Why Eclipse?

About the Eclipse Platform

Also see this description of the underlying Rich Client Platform if you have more interest in RCP than in the complete platform.

The Basic Eclipse Platform

The basic Eclipse platform and the accompanying technology and tools are fast becoming the industry standard when it comes to an open and efficient development platform.

The Eclipse development platform provides one of the very best Java development platforms, but also supports a very wide range of other languages through a very flexible plug-in system - e.g. C/C++, SQL, Python and Fortran.

Some of these languages are supported by the Eclipse tools project itself, but many of them are supported via independent developers and companies and distributed via sites such as the Eclipse plug-in central.

The Java Development Environment Market

The Java development environment is a very central part of the Eclipse platform. The market for Java based development environments has gone from 8-12 serious development environments to just three in 4-6 years:

• Eclipse^TM
• Sun NetBeans^TM
• JetBrains IntellijIDEA^TM

Of these Eclipse and IntellijIDEA by far has the most interest from 3rd party developers.

The major difference between the two is that where the Eclipse platform is an open source system, IntellijIDEA is a "normal" commercial closed source product. This has the simple consequence that the support and development community is much bigger for the Eclipse platform than for IntellijIDEA.

Another major difference between the three products is the number of languages that are supported by the platform.

Where NetBeans and IntellijIDEA both supports alternative languages (though primary Java related languages), they are absolutely no match to the number of languages supported by the Eclipse platform via 3rd party plug-ins.

Eclipse Variants

The Eclipse platform actually exists in a number of variants. Apart from the Eclipse platform as it can be downloaded from the Eclipse foundation, the most well-known of these are

• IBM Rational Software Development Platform^TM
• BEA WebLogic Workshop^TM
• Genuitec MyEclipse^TM

Note though that there are a number of other variants. Most variants of the Eclipse platform has a specific focus. E.g. IBM Rational Development Platform is aimed at J2EE whereas BEA WebLogic Workshop is aimed at enterprise infrastructure.

All of the listed variants are based on the basic toolset of the basic Eclipse platform. These include the following functionality on top on the basic RCP functionality (see Rich Client Platform):

• An advanced Java editor
• A common debug framework with built-in support for Java

Why Eclipse?

Why RCP?