Eclipse was originally developed by IBM as the next generation IDE development environment to replace Java commercial software Visual Age. 200 1+0 1 contributed to the open source community and is now managed by Eclipse Foundation, a non-profit software vendor alliance. In 2003, Eclipse 3.0 chose the OSGi service platform specification as the runtime architecture. In June 2007, the stable version 3.3 was released. Version 3.4 code-named Ganymede was released in June 2008. Version 3.5 code-named Galileo was released in July 2009.
Eclipse is a famous cross-platform free integrated development environment (IDE). At first, it was mainly used for Java language development, but now some people use it as a development tool for other computer languages such as C++ and Python through plug-ins. Eclipse itself is only a framework platform, but with the support of many plug-ins, Eclipse has the flexibility that other IDE software with relatively fixed functions can hardly have. Many software developers develop their own IDE based on Eclipse.
Eclipse was originally created by OTI and IBM's IDE product development team, starting from April 1999. IBM provided the original Eclipse code base, including platform, JDT and PDE. At present, led by IBM, the Eclipse project has developed into a huge Eclipse alliance, with more than 150 software companies participating in the Eclipse project, including Borland, Rational Software, Red Hat and Sybase. Eclipse is a development source project, which is actually a substitute for Visual Age for Java, and its interface is similar to the previous Visual Age for Java. However, because of its open source code, anyone can get it for free and develop their own plug-ins, which attracts more and more attention. Recently, many large companies, including Oracle, have joined the project, claiming that Eclipse will become the IDE master of any language development in the future, and users only need to download plug-ins in various languages.
Although most users are happy to use Eclipse as a Java IDE, the goal of Eclipse is not limited to this. Eclipse also includes a plug-in development environment (PDE), which is mainly aimed at software developers who want to extend Eclipse, because it allows them to build tools that integrate seamlessly with the Eclipse environment. Since everything in Eclipse is a plug-in, all tool developers have the same position in providing plug-ins for Eclipse and providing a consistent and unified integrated development environment for users.
An outstanding example of Eclipse-based application is IBM's WebSphere Studio Workbench, which forms the basis of IBM's Java development tool series. For example, WebSphere Studio Application Developer has added support for JSP, servlet, EJB, XML, Web service and database access.
The main components of Eclipse
Eclipse is an open source software development project, which is committed to providing a fully functional commercial industrial platform for highly integrated tool development. It mainly consists of three projects: Eclipse project, Eclipse tool project and Eclipse technology project, including four parts-Eclipse platform, JDT, CDT and PDE. JDT supports Java development, CDT supports C development and PDE supports plug-in development. Eclipse platform is an open and extensible IDE, which provides a general development platform. It provides a foundation for building modules and building and running integrated software development tools. Eclipse platform allows tool builders to independently develop tools that are seamlessly integrated with other people's tools, so there is no need to distinguish where one tool function ends and another tool function begins.
Eclipse SDK is a combination of components produced by Eclipse platform, JDT and PDE, which can be downloaded at one time. Together, these parts provide a rich development environment, allowing developers to effectively build tools that can be seamlessly integrated into the Eclipse platform. Eclipse SDK is a combination of tools produced by Eclipse project and other open source third-party software. The software produced by Eclipse project is released by CPL, and the third-party components have their own license agreements.