Eclipse -- an open source universal tool platform

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(Last updated: Nov. 14, 2001)

Eclipse is a kind of universal tool platform -- an open extensible IDE for anything but nothing in particular. The real value comes from tool plug-ins that "teach" Eclipse how to work with things -- java files, web content, graphics, video - almost anything you can imagine. Eclipse allows you to independently develop tools that integrate with other people's tools so seamlessly you won't know where one tool ends and another starts. The very notion of a tool as we know it... disappears completely...

The Eclipse Platform is designed for building integrated development environments (IDEs) that can be used to create applications as diverse as web sites, embedded Java programs, C++ programs, and Enterprise JavaBeans. Although the Eclipse Platform has a lot of built-in functionality, most of that functionality is very generic. It takes additional tools to extend the Platform to work with new content types, to do new things with existing content types, and to focus the generic functionality on something specific. The Eclipse Platform is built on a mechanism for discovering, integrating, and running modules called plug-ins. A tool provider writes a tool as a separate plug-in that operates on files in the workspace and surfaces its tool-specific UI in the workbench. When the Platform is launched, the user is presented with an integrated development environment (IDE) composed of the set of available plug-ins. The quality of the user experience depends significantly on how well the tools integrate with the Platform and how well the various tools work with each other.

The Java-based open source software -- code-named Eclipse -- will enable developers to use software tools from multiple suppliers together, allowing developers to integrate business processes used to create e-business applications, such as those for Web services. Today, developers typically use tools and middleware from multiple vendors that are not designed to work together, so they are cumbersome and time-consuming to integrate. By using software tools that easily "plug into" Eclipse, developers can create higher-quality applications in less time and inherit technology developed by other vendors. Eclipse provides a single, unified experience of all development processes and integrates all development tasks such as testing, performance tuning, and debugging. Eclipse also changes the dynamics of application development, since its plug-in integration encourages team-oriented development and supports developers working in diverse roles such as the Internet, intranets, CRM applications, portals, mobile, commerce, and business process management.

The Eclipse open source community already involves more than 150 leading software tool suppliers working together to evolve Eclipse software, which will be available free to developers. More than 1,200 individual developers from 63 countries have participated in the Eclipse open source community process. The community will be managed by a multi-vendor organization and will include participation by companies such as IBM, Merant, QSSL, Rational, Red Hat, TogetherSoft, and others. The community will shortly announce details about the organization, including the multi-vendor board of directors.

A free whitepaper entitled Eclipse Platform Technical Over view is available here (PDF download).

The above text has been excerpted from the eclipse.org website.

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