Architecture Patterns and Code Templates for Enterprise RCP Applications

The best of the day! Some insightful lecture and 4 well-scoped hands-on practical exercises.

An architectural pattern was discussed and formed the basis of their project structure. Core to this was the notion of a "bootstrapper" - an executable product with minimum code that can be easily deployed to a client and that, when run, automatically connects to a P2 repository and installs features. Sound familiar yet?

They described a set of four project types they referred to as a "quad":

1. Bundle+
2. Packaging+
3. Deployment
4. Release engineering

The pluses denote multiple projects. The "Bundle" is self-evident. "Packaging" would be feature(s). Both are simple Maven/Tycho-built projects. The "Deployment" part is either the product project (the bootstrapper) or an update site project and the P2 repository providing the features. The "Release Engineering" part (or "releng" as they called it) is the Maven/Tycho bits - poms and modules.

An interesting take on what is becoming an industry standard way of building RCP applications. More at the presenters blog.

The labs were simple, well-scoped, solutions-provided, PDF-described, well-discussed, and zipped for us. We should be able to use the poms as examples. It'll be some time before we can use the auto-update-on-startup code but we have it now. Like I said, best of the day.