Staying afloat in an expanding sea of choices: emerging best practices for eclipse rich client platform development

The Eclipse Rich Client Platform attracts considerable attention for being a promising candidate for providing the component model Java never had. This is even truer since the incorporation of OSGi for providing services within the framework. However, the rapid sequence of new versions and the continuous growth of features lead to a discussion that almost exclusively focused on technological aspects while leaving application developers in the midst of a sea of sometimes conflicting choices of how to implement their business-oriented applications. This lack of guidance leads to systems with vastly different architectures (or lack thereof) which often force complete rewrites when further development steps are to be taken. The best practices and architectural blueprints that provide this guidance in the field of object- or service-orientation haven´t emerged yet. In this experience report, we render our observations made in several projects over the last years about the challenges that cooperating teams of application developers face when using RCP. We provide a first business-oriented architectural blue-print and best practices that have helped us greatly to overcome these challenges.