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Eclipse Unleashed
After a year on its own Eclipse has tremendous support from the Java community
by Mike Milinkovich

June 27, 2005

Just over a year ago, the Eclipse Foundation was formed as a not-for-profit corporation, and the Eclipse community became fully independent of IBM. Today Eclipse is the engine of innovation for development tools within the Java community. At the time of this writing, Eclipse.org is home to more than 40 open source projects, with 18 more in the proposal stage. The projects span the entire software development life cycle, from modeling to development to post-deployment application monitoring. Research projects are looking at issues as diverse as model-driven development to embedded application frameworks to trust frameworks in social networks.

But while Eclipse is where many new ideas are being implemented in Java, Eclipse's goals extend well beyond the Java platform. Our tooling may be written in Java, but we also have tools that cover many programming languages and platforms beyond Java.

Most readers will be familiar with Eclipse through its Java development tools (JDT) project, which provides the world's most popular Java development environment. In fact, it is probably fair to say that most Java developers think that Eclipse is a Java IDE. This perception is a very large misconception.

Eclipse first started in 2001 and was described as "…a kind of universal tool platform—an open, extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular." Of course, what came with it at the time as a tangible, useful open source project was its Java tools. However, soon after that, additional projects were created to build further functionality on top of the Eclipse platform to address other problem domains. The C/C++ development tools (CDT) project is a great example, as are our Graphical Editing Framework and Eclipse Modeling Framework projects.

So if thinking of Eclipse as a Java IDE is a misconception, what exactly is this thing called Eclipse?

First let's look at Eclipse as an open source community. Second, we'll talk about Eclipse's technical vision as the universal development platform. Then we'll examine Eclipse as an ecosystem, and lastly, as a not-for-profit foundation.