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).

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.

Their promoters 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 and NetBeans RCPs for Java.

See also

• Thin client
• Fat client
• Ajax (programming)

Software architecture