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Modern n-tier applications are developed using components implemented in many different technologies, including HTML, Java(TM), JavaServer Pages(TM) (JSP(TM)), Enterprise JavaBeans(TM), connectors, COBOL or PL/1 programs, and relational database schemas. Creating an effective integrated development environment (IDE) for use in programming these applications presents some special challenges because a large number of different tool technologies have to be tightly integrated in support of development task flows. In order to meet these challenges, the Eclipse Platform was designed to serve as the common basis for diverse IDE-based products, providing open APIs (application programming interfaces) to facilitate this integration. This paper describes the overall architecture of the Eclipse Platform and the www.eclipse.org open source organization and consortium created to facilitate broad industry adoption of this platform.
Customers developing applications need a variety of different tools from various tool vendors to support the full software development life cycle. Developers can be more productive and effective if these tools work well together. Integrated development environments (IDEs) can aid in the integration of tools to facilitate the software development process and will succeed in doing so to the extent that the community of tool developers can be influenced to develop tools in ways that increase the likelihood of their interoperation with other tools.
The Eclipse Platform was created to address this issue by providing a common platform for diverse IDE-based products and facilitate their integration. The first part of this paper introduces and gives an historical perspective of IDEs, followed by a description of the technical aspects of the Eclipse Platform. In the second part, we discuss the efforts of the Eclipse community of tool developers to make the Eclipse Platform ubiquitous.
A brief history of commercial IDEs. In the early days of programming, the only software development tools that programmers really needed were a compiler for the language they were programming in and a link editor and loader to combine the compiled files into executable form. Programs were composed offline; debugging was done primarily with output statements inserted in the code. With the advent of time-sharing, programs started to be written and debugged interactively by using the computer as well. The earliest commercial IDEs were built for the programming languages BASIC1 and APL.2 The Emacs editor3 is arguably...