It's just a simple matter of "getting them convinced to try it." So said Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich during a live webinar produced by SYS-CON Media and presented by SYS-CON.TV at the Reuters television studio overlooking Times Square in New York.

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Milinkovich was referring to Eclipse RCP, which was the centerpiece of discussion during the live event, which was streamed to a global audience of thousands of developers and IT managers. He was joined by Instantiations CEO Mike Taylor.

Taylor outlined a number of the key benefits of his company's product, RCP Developer, which the Instantiations website notes is designed "to accelerate the creation of Eclipse RCP applications by providing tools for constructing and testing graphical user interfaces and packaging rich client applications for deployment."

Instantiations' software works with any Eclipse 3.1 development environment, Taylor noted. It has three component products: SWT Designer, WindowTester, and RCP Packager. Taylor also answered a number of technical questions about the company's products in particular and the RCP approach in general that were sent in by e-mail from the live audience.

Milinkovich, in summarizing the benefits of the RCP approach, said "this is about bringing Java back to the desktop," a thought which both he and Taylor said applies to all developers. As an example, when questioned about its benefits to current .NET developers, Milinkovich noted "that for programmers who program in C#, for example, it's not a big jump. And the fact that developers can build, deploy, and manage applications on multiple desktops and operating systems make this a differentiator."