Plug-in development 101, Part 2: Introducing Rich-Client Applications

Configuration 

The Configuration tab contains the basic building blocks needed to run your product. This includes information such as the artifacts needed to run your product. The first section, Plug-ins and Fragments, simply lists the plug-ins and fragments needed to run your product. As a helpful tip, there will be times when you're working on your product and dependencies will be introduced. When this happens, it's always keen to select the Add Required Plug-ins to calculate if anything needs to be added to your product configuration.

The next section, Configuration File, represents an OSGi-specific artifact called the config.ini file. About 99.9 percent of the time, you want to leave this setting alone and have Eclipse generate the file. All this file contains really is what you have specified in the previous plug-ins and fragments section, but in a special format Eclipse can understand when launching.

Figure 9. Configuration

Launching

The Launching tab contains all the information that deals with launching your Eclipse-based product. The Java Runtime Environment section allows you the convenience of bundling platform-specific JREs. The Program Launcher section allows you to customize the executable that launches the product. For example, it's common that developers want something other than eclipse.exe for the name of their launcher executables. On top of naming the launcher executable, you can also brand it using platform-specific icons. The Launching Arguments section allows you to specify platform-specific launch parameters for your product. This may be useful if you want any special behavior on an operating system, such as Mac OS X.

Figure 10. Launching

Splash

The Splash tab allows you to optionally configure a splash screen for your product (see Figure 11). For example, when you launch Eclipse, you get a simple splash screen that says Eclipse and shows loading plug-in progress. By default, your example RCP application came with a simple bitmap-based splash screen. However, to demonstrate the interesting things you can do with your splash screen, we'll take advantage of the login splash screen template (in the Customization section). Once you select the log-in template, save your product configuration and launch your application

Figure 11. Splash

Notice the new splash screen with a login and password.

Figure 12. Custom splash screen