ll RCP applications must define at least one perspective; otherwise, there would be nothing to lay out the views. Think of a perspective as a set of layout hints for a window . Every IWorkbenchWindow has one page. The page owns its editor and view instances and uses the active perspective to decide its layout. The perspective details where, and whether or not, to show certain things, such as views, the editor area, and actions. The following provides an overview of the main parts of an IWorkbenchWindow.
A perspective factory provides the initial layout for a perspective. When a perspective is needed, the factory is created and passed an IPageLayout to which views are added. The factory is then discarded. As the user rearranges the contents of the perspective, the Workbench saves the settings on exit and restores them at startup (if so configured). The perspective generated by the PDE template uses the default layout. IPageLayout contains several methods for defining the layout of a perspective. Everything added to a perspective is related to something else.
eg:
Here the editor area is used as the base for placing the Contacts view. The Contacts view is added to the left of the editor area and is given all available space in the page by specifying 1.0f as the layout ratio. The ratio describes how to divide the available space between the Contacts view and its reference part, in this case, the editor area. The ratio must be between 0.0f (only the title bar is shown) and 1.0f (the view takes up the entire window area).
NOTE
Editors cannot be added to a perspective layout. Instead, you position the area in the perspective in which editors are opened. It’s also possible to hide and show the editor area using IWorkbenchPage.setEditorAreaVisible(boolean).