An Evaluation of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform for a telecom management application

Sammanfattning: The Software Management Organizer (SMO) application is used by telecom operators for remote software and hardware handling of telecommunication equipment. The graphical user interface (GUI) provided by SMO is called SMO GUI and is costly to maintain, extend and test.The Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) provides a platform for building component based GUIs with rich functionality. This thesis is to evaluate how the Eclipse RCP can be used for building a new SMO GUI. The evaluation will be performed by building a prototype for a new SMO GUI based on the Eclipse RCP. The thesis shall investigate the difficultness of integrating the prototype in the existing SMO architecture and evaluate how problems that exist in the current SMO GUI can be solved by using the Eclipse RCP.It was possible to implement a prototype based on the Eclipse RCP that integrates with the existing SMO architecture. The Eclipse RCP provides good support for creating a flexible, extensible and testable application. The drawback of using the Eclipse RCP is the lack of support for detecting configuration errors and the lack of documentation of new features.The Eclipse Rich Client Platform can be used as a base for building a new SMO GUI. An Eclipse RCP application can be integrated in the existing SMO architecture. The Eclipse RCP provides support for creating an application without the architectural, extendable, testable and quality problems that exists in the current SMO GUI.