Combining editors and views with perspectives
Just as SWT Composites use Layouts to arrange child components, workbenches select and organize editors and views with perspectives. For example, the Eclipse platform displays one set of editors and views in the Java perspective and another set when you choose the Debug perspective.
Although the majority of the work involved in RCP development deals with building and arranging editors and views, you also need to create a set of classes that provides the workbench’s basic functionality.
RCP development starts by creating an Eclipse plug-in project, but it’s important to understand that the end result is not a plug-in. The ultimate goal is to build an application that functions independently from the Eclipse Workbench.
To make this point clear, we need to go into greater technical depth. The difference between a plug-in and an RCP application centers around a small kernel called the platform runtime. This is the first element of Eclipse to execute, and it functions by organizing plug-ins and controlling their operation. Unlike a plug-in, a workbench contains its own platform runtime, which means that it controls its own operation. You can execute a workbench like a regular Java application. But even though a workbench operates differently than a plug-in, the process of creating one requires that you build a plug-in project.