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Eclipse
The Eclipse Platform is designed for building integrated development environments (IDEs) that can be used to create applications as diverse as web sites, embedded JavaTM programs, C++ programs, and Enterprise JavaBeansTM. This paper is a general technical introduction to the Eclipse Platform. Part I presents a technical overview of its architecture. Part II is a case study of how the Eclipse Platform was used to build a full-featured Java development environment. 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 Eclipse Platform (or simply "the Platform" when there is no risk of confusion) is designed and built to meet the following requirements: - Support the construction of a variety of tools for application development.
- Support an unrestricted set of tool providers, including independent software vendors (ISVs).
- Support tools to manipulate arbitrary content types (e.g., HTML, Java, C, JSP, EJB, XML, and GIF).
- Facilitate seamless integration of tools within and across different content types and tool providers.
- Support both GUI and non-GUI-based application development environments.
- Run on a wide range of operating systems, including Windows® and LinuxTM.
- Capitalize on the popularity of the Java programming language for writing tools.
The Eclipse Platform's principal role is to provide tool providers with mechanisms to use, and rules to follow, that lead to seamlessly-integrated tools. These mechanisms are exposed via well-defined API interfaces, classes, and methods. The Platform also provides useful building blocks and frameworks that facilitate developing new tools.
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