I’m on a project where we try to build a GUI replacement for an old application. Before we really implement the functionality we’ve started prototyping with Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) and GWT (Google widget toolkit, a Rich Internet Application). What is your experience with RIA and RCP GUIs? When does it make sense to use RIA and in which situations a rich client is more suitable? With the current possibilities of RIA, it becomes more and more difficult to draw the line.. Do you have any experiences?
EDIT:
All your answers are really interesting. I’d like to accept all of them as they contribute to the answer of my, I admit a quite open question. So my vote up for each of them. Hope the bounty will be shared among you.
There’s not any detail on the requirements of your application which is really key to answering the question.
The big win for using GWT is the ease of deployment relative to something like RCP. There is nothing easier for the user than pointing their web browser at a URL and nothing easier for the operations team than pushing code to the server, bouncing it and calling it a day.
As far as functionality, the big area where GWT will come up short would be richer data visualizations: charting, tree/node, network diagrams, etc. This stuff is possible with GWT and some help on the server but the limitations of DHTML start to show through, even with a powerful toolkit like GWT. On the other hand, RCP gives you the full power of Java 2D to visualize anything you want. These kinds of features may not be necessary to you but they’re also the ones that make applications really interesting, more than just a mess of tab, tree and data grid controls.
I’ve been developing with Adobe Flex for several years now and find it to be really powerful, having more or less the same deployment advantages as something like GWT but offering the same kind of power as RCP. You might want to check that out too.