What is Eclipse?

Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) that was primarily developed by IBM through the formation of the Eclipse Foundation. Eclipse is mostly written in Java; hence, its primary use is to develop Java applications. However, with the use of plug-ins, it can also be used to develop applications in other languages.

History

In November 2001, a consortium was formed by IBM to support the development of the Eclipse IDE as an open-source software. In 2004, it became the Eclipse Foundation. The foundation eventually established itself as a not-for-profit organization whose main goals were to guide, implement, and share the development of open-source Eclipse projects in a vendor-neutral environment.

Eclipse was named as such because it was aimed to ‘eclipse’ Microsoft Visual Studio, its main competitor at that time.

Architecture

As previously mentioned, Eclipse uses plug-ins to provide all the functionality within and on top of the runtime system. The runtime system is based on Equinox, an implementation of the OSGi core framework specification.

Plug-ins allow Eclipse to be used with other programming languages, typesetting languages like LaTeX, and networking applications such as database management systems.

More information on Eclipse, including its documentation and installation guide, can be found on their website.