Rich Client Infrastructure provides the following functions:
Activity framework to describe operations
You can create activities based on existing activities or just create one from scratch. Activity is a unit for you to easily launch a specified operation, such as launching a transaction panel, logging a journal, and so on. It can be globally unique or multiple, running synchronously or asynchronously according to the GUI. Activities are differentiated by their unique IDs.
Rich Client Infrastructure enables an activity manager to manage the life cycle of each activity, such as creating an activity, launching an activity, finding an activity and closing an activity. You can easily manage and trace these activities by the activity manager.
Rich Client Infrastructure also provides some pre-build activities for you to use or extend, such as launching an SWT visual beans based transaction view or doing operations before perspective initialized.
Navigation tree to launch activities
Rich Client Infrastructure offers a pre-build navigation tree component. This navigation tree is generated automatically when you extend some UDTT rich client extension points. It provides many functions, including displaying sequence, quick launch bar, hot key launch, icon customization, and so on.
Navigation items can bind to activities, and when you click a navigation item, the related activities are launched. All these definitions are under the architecture of eclipse plug-in, so you can share the benefits of Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) architecture.
Rich Client Infrastructure offers API to update the navigation tree contents dynamically.
Customized layout
In rich client teller, layout elements are differentiated among Folders, Pages and Views. Pages are listed in a Folder.
Rich Client Infrastructure offers a pre-build perspective. You can specify the layout elements by writing an XML definition file, and then add the URL of this file to the extension point. The perspective can analyze the XML file, and then generate the layout automatically. The layout definition file can be put in the jar file or on a web server. You can have different layouts by loading different layout definition files.
Multiple application integration support
Rich Client Infrastructure offers a series of pre-build activities, so you can launch Swing, SWT, ActiveX, or Web based applications easily. You can also extend the pre-build activities to customize them for local applications.
UDTT 4.3 desktop based applications migration
If the applications are based on UDTT 4.3, you can migrate them to the rich client platform smoothly with little effort and no GUI re-implementation.
Rich Client Platform (RCP) and Lotus Expeditor (LE) property broker service
You can use the property broker service component that Rich Client Infrastructure offers to communicate with other applications. It supports the following message transformation type: RCP<->RCP, Portlet->RCP (with Lotus Expeditor), RCP<->Swing, RCP<->Ole. The knowledge about Lotus Expeditor property broker mechanism is not required. You can use UDTT RCP API directly.
For RCP->Portlet (with Lotus Expeditor) transformation type, you need to know the Lotus Expeditor wire mechanism and use it with UDTT RCP property broker together.
Global context sharing and Rich Client class loader
The UDTT Context supports global data sharing. You can easily store your data into Context and get it anywhere from the Context tree.
You can use the UDTT RCP Class Loader to load extension classes in your project. It can assure the global uniqueness for UDTT core components, so you do not need to put bttcore.jar into your project every time.
Complex application integration
You can integrate the Rich Client Infrastructure with Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) applications like Microsoft Office easily.