Is there any good book or tutorial that shows how to use SWT in a RCP application? As far as I know Eclipse itself is an RCP app with SWT GUI components.

Some further questions:

1. Why are there so few Java-based desktop applications out there? Are they too big, too slow or can they be decompiled too easily?

2. How behaves a Java SWT application, that uses the JNI for expensive algorithms, compared to a pure C++ application?