Probably the question at or near the top of your list is, Why would I want to use NetBeans RCP?. Before we get into the details of the application, let's address this very fair question, and try to understand why we're building it the way we are.
One of the first things you'll notice when you start looking into the NetBeans platform is the strong notion of modularity. With the Java Module System being such a prominent feature of Java 9, this may seem like a minor detail, but NetBeans exposes this concept to us at the application level, making plugins incredibly simple, as well as allowing us to update the application on a piecemeal basis.
The RCP also provides a robust, well-tested framework for handling windows, menus, actions, nodes, services, and so on. If we were to build this application from scratch, as we've done in the previous chapters using plain JavaFX, we would have to manually define areas on the screen, then handle window placement by hand. With the RCP, we have...