Eclipse Framework
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[edit] Eclipse
Eclipse is a Java-based, plug-in extensible, open source development platform. It started as an IBM Canada project in November 2001. In January 2004, the Eclipse Foundation was created as an independent not-for-profit, member supported corporation. The founding Strategic Developers and Strategic Consumers were Ericsson, HP, IBM, Intel, MontaVista Software, QNX, SAP and Serena Software. More background information is available here.
The Eclipse framework targets different usage scenarios, including embedded devices development and enterprise development.
In its simplest form, Eclipse is a framework providing a set of services for building plug-in components and, therefore, all plug-ins are created equal. One of the indispensable components is the Workbench. It consists of perspectives, views and editors. A perspective is a collection of one or more views and editors (e.g. Navigator view, Outline view, Tasks view). It also comes with CVS support built-in. Workbench also provides extension points allowing any plug-in to extend the Eclipse user interface by adding new interface functionalities, creating new views, etc...
Every plug-in declares some descriptive information in a manifest XML file called plugin.xml, such as the plugin name, version number, .jar file name, dependencies on other plugins, extension points, etc... An extension point may declare additional specialized XML element types for use in the extensions. This allows the plug-in supplying the extension to communicate arbitrary information to the plug-in declaring the corresponding extension point. The manifest information is used by Eclipse to integrate this plug-in into the framework. The new plug-in can be attached, tested and debugged without having to restart Eclipse.
Various plug-ins with different functionalities already exist or are currently being developed. As an example, the CDT plug-in provides support for other programming languages like C/C++. Other plug-ins, such as TPTP, address software testing, profiling and trace analysis.
Due to the flexibility offered by the robust design of Eclipse, numerous different projects based on Eclipse are currently being developed and are released simultaneously, like the Ganymede version on June 25, 2008 (Ganymede Simultaneous Release Projects). A more detailed list of eclipse based projects is available here.
