About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Eclipse (software)

Encyclopedia : E : EC : ECL : Eclipse (software)

Eclipse is a free software / open source platform-independent software framework for delivering what the project calls "rich-client applications", as opposed to "thin client" browser-based applications. So far this framework has typically been used to develop IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), such as the Java IDE called Java Development Toolkit (JDT) and compiler that comes as part of Eclipse (and which are also used to develop Eclipse itself). However, it can be used for other types of client application as well. See the BitTorrent client Azureus for example.

Eclipse is also a community of users, constantly extending the covered application areas. As an example, the recently created EMP Eclipse (Top Level) Modeling Project covering most areas of Model Driven Engineering.

Eclipse was originally developed by IBM as the successor of its VisualAge family of tools. Eclipse is now managed by the Eclipse Foundation, an independent not-for-profit consortium of software industry vendors. Many notable software tool vendors have embraced Eclipse as a future framework for their IDEs, among them Borland, BEA Systems, IBM Rational and Xilinx FPGA Development.

Contents

Architecture

The basis for Eclipse is the rich client platform (RCP). The following components constitute the rich client platform:

Eclipse's widgets are implemented by a third generation widget toolkit for Java called SWT, unlike most Java applications, which use Sun's first and second generation toolkits (AWT and Swing, respectively). Eclipse's user interface also leverages an intermediate GUI layer called JFace, which simplifies the construction of applications based on SWT.

Eclipse employs plugins in order to provide all of its functionality on top of the rich client platform, in contrast to some other IDEs where functionality is typically hard-coded. This plugin mechanism is a lightweight software componentry framework and for example allows Eclipse to support other languages in addition to Java. Separate plugins have been created that add support for, among others, C/C++ ([CDT]), CFML (CFEclipse), Fortran ([Photran]), Lua (LDT), PHP (PHPeclipse), Perl (EPIC), Ruby ([RDT]), Python ([PyDev]), telnet and database development. There is also a plugin facilitating Wikipedia editing: [Plog4U]. The plugin architecture supports writing any desired extension to the environment, such as for configuration management. It does not have to be used solely to support other programming languages.

Eclipse is also an example of a SCID, an IDE which stores its code in a database rather than a flat text file.[link] This allows for advanced refactoring techniques.

Eclipse projects

Eclipse is composed of many different projects. Some projects are listed below. A complete list can be found [here].

History

Eclipse began as an IBM Canada project. It was developed by OTI (Object Technology International) as a replacement for VisualAge which itself had been developed by OTI. In November 2001, a consortium was formed to further the development of Eclipse as open source. In 2003, an IBM-independent foundation was created.

Eclipse 3.0 (2003) selected the OSGi Service Platform specifications as the runtime architecture.

Callisto

In 2006 the Eclipse Foundation coordinated its 10 open-source projects, including the Eclipse Platform 3.2, to release on a same day. This simultaneous release was known as the [Callisto release].

Licensing

Eclipse was originally released under the Common Public License, but was later relicensed under the Eclipse Public License. The Free Software Foundation has said that both licenses are free software licenses, but are incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL). [link] Mike Milinkovich, of the Eclipse Foundation has commented that moving to the GPL will be considered when version 3 of the GPL is released. [link]

Localization

As of October 2005, the following language packs are available for Eclipse 3.1.1 (in alphabetical order): Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Spanish. [link]

References

External links

See also





 





From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.














Search Titles









0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?










E-mail this article to:



Personal Message: