In a little more than a year, the Eclipse project initiated by IBM has become one of the most dynamic and widely-supported open source efforts of any kind, especially within the Java community.
In a little more than a year, the Eclipse project initiated by IBM has become one of the most dynamic and widely-supported open source efforts of any kind, especially within the Java community.
Eclipse, an integrated development environment (IDE) and application framework written entirely in Java, is a programming language-independent and tool-agnostic platform designed from the ground up to be extended by plug-in tools. In fact, the only core components of the software do nothing more than boot the application and load plug-ins — everything else is a plug-in. The Eclipse platform is available on the Web at http://www.eclipse.org, a site published and maintained by the Eclipse Consortium group, which includes Red Hat, SuSE, and QNX among its members.
An article in the April 2003 issue of Linux Magazine (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-04/eclipse_01.html) described Eclipse’s use as a “world-class Java IDE,” showing how it supports a robust selection of features, including refactoring, code completion, intelligent templates, CVS, and tools such as Ant, JUnit, and make. Indeed, because it’s getting so much attention as an IDE, Java programmers who are happy with their own development tools may be paying little attention to Eclipse, thinking that’s all it is.
But that’s a shame, because Eclipse has valuable features for Java programmers: Eclipse has its own application framework and offers the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), a set of graphical user interface packages that easily rivals Swing, the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT), and other libraries.
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