A Rich Client Platform (RCP) is a piece of software consisting of the following components:
- a core
- a standard bundling framework
- a portable widget toolkit
- file buffers, text handling, text editors
- a workbench (views, editors, perspectives, wizards)
- Update Manager
Programmers can build their own applications on existing platforms. Instead of having to write a complete application from scratch, they can benefit from proven and tested features of the framework provided by the platform. Building on a platform facilitates faster application development and integration, while the cross-platform burden is taken on by the platform developers.
Their creators claim that programs built with RCP platforms are portable to many operating systems while being as rich as client-server applications which use so called fat clients or traditional clients.
Open source examples are the Eclipse, NetBeans and Spring Framework RCPs for Java.
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Client_Platform
