1. What is Eclipse?¶

It is not easy to explain in few words what Eclipse™ is. (Definitely, the Eclipse we are talking about is not an astronomical phenomenon. It is also not about Vampires.) This book is about the Software Eclipse that can be extended to do almost anything.

To give technical details of Eclipse, we can throw many jargons to the reader. OSGI, Platform, Workspace, SWT, Run-time, plug-ins, PDE, etc. The architecture of Eclipse. How things get together within Eclipse. How it internally works. Instead, we would take a practical approach. We would try to hide the internals of Eclipse. We would see a quick highlight of what Eclipse can do.

Technically, Eclipse is a plugin based framework. As it is plugin based, it can be extended to do a lot of diverse things. Eclipse is not just a Java/J2EE IDE. It is also an IDE for web Development [1], Python [2], perl, PHP, Ruby on Rails [1], etc.

Eclipse is also not only a programming IDE. It is also,

A chat client

The IBM® Lotus Notes® Sametime® (http://www.lotus.com/sametime). [3]
A bit-torrent client

Azurus (now called Vuze) [4]
Many of the Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) based products

Even for C/C++ Development, it has many variants.

Eclipse/CDT:

Eclipse/CDT:	http://eclipse.org/downloads (The basic Eclipse with CDT)
Wascana:	http://www.eclipselabs.org/p/wascana (Wascana Eclipse C/C++ IDE for Windows Developers)
Wind River™ Workbench:
	http://www.windriver.com/products/workbench/ (WindRiver’s IDE based on Eclipse)

http://eclipse.org/downloads

(The basic Eclipse with CDT)

Wascana:

http://www.eclipselabs.org/p/wascana

(Wascana Eclipse C/C++ IDE for Windows Developers)

Wind River™ Workbench:

http://www.windriver.com/products/workbench/

(WindRiver’s IDE based on Eclipse)