Eclipse is an

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a Application software, software application that provides comprehensive facilities for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source-code editor, build automation tools, an ...

(IDE) used in

computer programming Computer programming or coding is the composition of sequences of instructions, called computer program, programs, that computers can follow to perform tasks. It involves designing and implementing algorithms, step-by-step specifications of proc ...

. It contains a base workspace and an extensible plug-in system for customizing the environment. It had been the most popular IDE for

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

development until 2016, when it was surpassed by

IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ IDEA () is an integrated development environment (IDE) written in Java for developing computer software written in Java, Kotlin, Groovy, and other JVM-based languages. It is developed by JetBrains (formerly known as IntelliJ) and is a ...

. Eclipse is written mostly in Java and its primary use is for developing Java applications, but it may also be used to develop applications in other

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

s via plug-ins, including Ada,

ABAP ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming, originally ''Allgemeiner Berichts-Aufbereitungs-Prozessor'', German for "general report preparation processor") is a high-level programming language created by the German software company SAP SE. ...

, C, C++, C#,

Clojure Clojure (, like ''closure'') is a dynamic programming language, dynamic and functional programming, functional dialect (computing), dialect of the programming language Lisp (programming language), Lisp on the Java (software platform), Java platfo ...

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural, and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily ...

, D, Erlang, Fortran,

Groovy ''Groovy'' (or, less commonly, ''groovie'' or ''groovey'') is a slang colloquialism popular during the 1960s and 1970s. It is roughly synonymous with words such as "excellent", "fashionable", or "amazing", depending on context. History The word ...

Haskell Haskell () is a general-purpose, statically typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research, and industrial applications, Haskell pioneered several programming language ...

HLASM The IBM Basic assembly language and successors is a series of assembly languages and assemblers made for the IBM System/360 mainframe system and its successors through the IBM Z. The first of these, the Basic Assembly Language (BAL), is an ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

, Julia,

Lasso A lasso or lazo ( or ), also called reata or la reata in Mexico, and in the United States riata or lariat (from Mexican Spanish lasso for roping cattle), is a loop of rope designed as a restraint to be thrown around a target and tightened when ...

, Lua,

NATURAL Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the laws, elements and phenomena of the physical world, including life. Although humans are part ...

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

, PHP,

PL/I PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced and sometimes written PL/1) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language initially developed by IBM. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming. It has b ...

Prolog Prolog is a logic programming language that has its origins in artificial intelligence, automated theorem proving, and computational linguistics. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic. Unlike many other programming language ...

, Python, R,

Rexx Rexx (restructured extended executor) is a high-level programming language developed at IBM by Mike Cowlishaw. Both proprietary and open-source software, open source Rexx interpreter (computing), interpreters exist for a wide range of comput ...

Ruby Ruby is a pinkish-red-to-blood-red-colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapph ...

(including Ruby on Rails framework),

Rust Rust is an iron oxide, a usually reddish-brown oxide formed by the reaction of iron and oxygen in the catalytic presence of water or air moisture. Rust consists of hydrous iron(III) oxides (Fe2O3·nH2O) and iron(III) oxide-hydroxide (FeO(OH) ...

, Scala, and Scheme. It can also be used to develop documents with

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...

(via a TeXlipse plug-in) and packages for the software

Mathematica Wolfram (previously known as Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network ...

. Development environments include the Eclipse Java development tools (JDT) for Java and Scala, Eclipse CDT for C/C++, and Eclipse PDT for PHP, among others. The initial

codebase In software development, a codebase (or code base) is a collection of source code used to build a particular software system, application, or software component. Typically, a codebase includes only human-written source code system files; thu ...

originated from IBM VisualAge. The Eclipse

software development kit A software development kit (SDK) is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. They facilitate the creation of applications by having a compiler, debugger and sometimes a software framework. They are normally specific t ...

(SDK), which includes the Java development tools, is meant for Java developers. Users can extend its abilities by installing plug-ins written for the Eclipse Platform, such as development toolkits for other programming languages, and can write and contribute their own plug-ins. Since Eclipse 3.0 (released in 2004), plug-ins are installed and managed as "bundles" using

Equinox A solar equinox is a moment in time when the Sun appears directly above the equator, rather than to its north or south. On the day of the equinox, the Sun appears to rise directly east and set directly west. This occurs twice each year, arou ...

, an implementation of

OSGi OSGi is an open specification and open source project under the Eclipse Foundation. It is a continuation of the work done by the OSGi Alliance (formerly known as the Open Services Gateway initiative), which was an open standards organization fo ...

. The Eclipse SDK is

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

, released under the terms of the

Eclipse Public License The Eclipse Public License (EPL) is a free and open source software license most notably used for the Eclipse IDE and other projects by the Eclipse Foundation. It replaces the Common Public License (CPL) and removes certain terms relating t ...

, although it is incompatible with the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. It was one of the first IDEs to run under GNU Classpath and it runs without problems under IcedTea.

History

Eclipse was inspired by the

Smalltalk Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learni ...

-based VisualAge family of

(IDE) products. Although fairly successful, a major drawback of the VisualAge products was that developed code was not in a

component-based software engineering Component-based software engineering (CBSE), also called component-based development (CBD), is a style of software engineering that aims to construct a software system from software component, components that are loosely-Coupling (computer program ...

model. Instead, all code for a project was held in a compressed database using SCID techniques (somewhat like a zip file but in .dat). Individual classes could not be easily accessed, certainly not outside the tool. A team primarily at the IBM Cary, North Carolina, lab developed the new product as a Java-based replacement. In November 2001, a consortium was formed with a board of stewards to further the development of Eclipse as

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

. It is estimated that IBM had already invested nearly $40 million by that time. The original members were

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computing technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was developing and selling software development and software deployment products. B ...

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

, Merant, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software,

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

, SuSE, TogetherSoft, and WebGain. The number of stewards increased to over 80 by the end of 2003. In January 2004, the

Eclipse Foundation The Eclipse Foundation AISBL is an independent, Europe-based not-for-profit organization that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community, with legal jurisdiction in the European Union. It is an organization supp ...

was created. Eclipse 3.0 (released on 21 June 2004) selected the

Service Platform specifications as the runtime architecture. The

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

recognized Eclipse with the 2011

ACM Software System Award The ACM Software System Award is an annual award that honors people or an organization "for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both". It is awarded b ...

on 26 April 2012. Recent releases of the Eclipse IDE have introduced support for the latest programming language standards, such as Java 23 and C++23, as well as usability enhancements including a refreshed light theme, improved code folding for Java, and updated C/C++ tooling based on the Clang compiler frontend.

Licensing

The

(EPL) is the fundamental license under which Eclipse projects are released. Some projects require dual licensing, for which the Eclipse Distribution License (EDL) is available, although use of this license must be applied for and is considered on a case-by-case basis. Eclipse was originally released under the Common Public License, but was later re-licensed under the Eclipse Public License. The

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985. The organisation supports the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

has said that both licenses are

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

licenses, but are incompatible with the

(GPL).

Name

According to Lee Nackman, Chief Technology Officer of IBM's Rational division (originating in 2003) at that time, the name "Eclipse" (dating from at least 2001) was not a wordplay on

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

, as the product's primary competition at the time of naming was

Microsoft Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms ...

, which ''Eclipse'' was to eclipse. Different versions of Eclipse have been given different science-related names. The versions named after

Callisto CALLISTO (''Cooperative Action Leading to Launcher Innovation in Stage Toss-back Operations'') is a reusable VTVL Prototype, demonstrator propelled by a small 40 kN Japanese LOX-LH2 rocket engine. It is being developed jointly by the CNES, French ...

, Europa, and Ganymede, which are moons of

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a Jupiter mass, mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined a ...

, were followed by a version named after

Galileo Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei ( , , ) or mononymously as Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a poly ...

, the discoverer of those moons. These were followed by two sun-themed names,

Helios In ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, mythology, Helios (; ; Homeric Greek: ) is the god who personification, personifies the Sun. His name is also Latinized as Helius, and he is often given the epithets Hyperion ("the one above") an ...

of Greek mythology, and

Indigo InterGlobe Aviation Limited (d/b/a IndiGo), is an India, Indian airline headquartered in Gurgaon, Haryana, India. It is the largest List of airlines of India, airline in India by passengers carried and fleet size, with a 64.1% domestic market ...

, one of the seven colors of a rainbow (which is produced by the sun). The version after that, Juno, has a triple meaning: a Roman mythological figure, an

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...

, and a spacecraft to Jupiter.

Kepler Johannes Kepler (27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of p ...

Luna Luna commonly refers to: * Earth's Moon, named "Luna" in Latin, Spanish and other languages * Luna (goddess) In Sabine and ancient Roman religion and myth, Luna is the divine embodiment of the Moon (Latin ''Lūna'' ). She is often presented as t ...

, and

Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It is also known as the "Red Planet", because of its orange-red appearance. Mars is a desert-like rocky planet with a tenuous carbon dioxide () atmosphere. At the average surface level the atmosph ...

continued the astronomy theme, and then

Neon Neon is a chemical element; it has symbol Ne and atomic number 10. It is the second noble gas in the periodic table. Neon is a colorless, odorless, inert monatomic gas under standard conditions, with approximately two-thirds the density of ...

and

Oxygen Oxygen is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol O and atomic number 8. It is a member of the chalcogen group (periodic table), group in the periodic table, a highly reactivity (chemistry), reactive nonmetal (chemistry), non ...

constituted a theme of

chemical elements A chemical element is a chemical substance whose atoms all have the same number of protons. The number of protons is called the atomic number of that element. For example, oxygen has an atomic number of 8: each oxygen atom has 8 protons in i ...

Photon A photon () is an elementary particle that is a quantum of the electromagnetic field, including electromagnetic radiation such as light and radio waves, and the force carrier for the electromagnetic force. Photons are massless particles that can ...

represented a return to sun-themed names. , the alphabetic scheme was abandoned in order to better align with the new Simultaneous Release strategy. Releases are named in the format YYYY-MM to reflect the quarterly releases, starting with version 4.9 named 2018-09.

Releases

Since 2006, the Foundation has coordinated an annual ''Simultaneous Release''. Each release includes the Eclipse Platform and several other Eclipse projects. From 2008 through 2018, each Simultaneous Release had occurred on the 4th Wednesday of June. In 2018 the project switched to quarterly (13 week) YYYY-MM releases without intermediate service releases.

Architecture

Eclipse uses plug-ins to provide all the functionality within and on top of the run-time system. Its run-time system is based on

, an implementation of the

core framework specification. In addition to allowing the Eclipse Platform to be extended using other

s, such as C and Python, the plug-in framework allows the Eclipse Platform to work with typesetting languages like

and networking applications such as

telnet Telnet (sometimes stylized TELNET) is a client-server application protocol that provides access to virtual terminals of remote systems on local area networks or the Internet. It is a protocol for bidirectional 8-bit communications. Its main ...

and

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and an ...

s. The plug-in architecture supports writing any desired extension to the environment, such as for

configuration management Configuration management (CM) is a management process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. ...

. Java and CVS support is provided in the Eclipse SDK, with support for other

version control system Version control (also known as revision control, source control, and source code management) is the software engineering practice of controlling, organizing, and tracking different versions in history of computer files; primarily source code ...

s provided by third-party plug-ins. With the exception of a small run-time kernel, everything in Eclipse is a plug-in. Thus, every plug-in developed integrates with Eclipse in the same way as other plug-ins; in this respect, all features are "created equal". Eclipse provides plug-ins for a wide variety of features, some of which are from third parties using both free and commercial models. Examples of plug-ins include for

Unified Modeling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. UML provides a standard notation for many types of diagrams which can be roughly ...

(UML), for Sequence and other UML diagrams, a plug-in for DB Explorer, and many more. The Eclipse SDK includes the Eclipse Java development tools (JDT), offering an IDE with a built-in Java incremental compiler and a full model of the Java source files. This allows for advanced refactoring techniques and code analysis. The IDE also makes use of a ''workspace'', in this case a set of

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

over a flat filespace allowing external file modifications as long as the corresponding workspace ''resource'' is refreshed afterward. Eclipse implements the graphical control elements of the Java toolkit called

Standard Widget Toolkit The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a graphical widget toolkit for use with the Java platform. It was originally developed by Stephen Northover at IBM and is now maintained by the Eclipse Foundation in tandem with the Eclipse IDE. It is an alte ...

(SWT), whereas most Java applications use the Java standard Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT), Swing, or JavaFX. Eclipse's

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

also uses an intermediate

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

layer called JFace, which simplifies the construction of applications based on SWT. Eclipse was made to run on Wayland during a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Project in 2014. , language packs being developed by the ''Babel Project'' provide translations into over 40

natural language A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...

Rich client platform

Eclipse provides the rich client platform (RCP) for developing general-purpose applications. The following components constitute the rich client platform: * Equinox OSGi – a standard bundling framework * Core platform – boot Eclipse, run plug-ins *

(SWT) – a portable

widget toolkit A widget toolkit, widget library, GUI toolkit, or UX library is a library (computing), library or a collection of libraries containing a set of graphical control elements (called ''widgets'') used to construct the graphical user interface (GUI) of ...

* JFace – viewer classes to bring model view controller programming to SWT, file buffers, text handling, text editors * Eclipse Workbench – views, editors, perspectives, wizards Examples of rich client applications based on Eclipse are: *

IBM Notes HCL Notes (formerly Lotus Notes then IBM Notes) is a proprietary collaborative software platform for Unix ( AIX), IBM i, Windows, Linux, and macOS, sold by HCLTech. The client application is called Notes while the server component is branded ...

8 and 9 * Attachmate-Novell NetIQ Designer for Identity Manager * Apache Directory Studio * Remote Component Environment * DBeaver, a SQL client software * Portfolio Performance * UDig, a GIS software * AnyLogic, a multimethod simulation modeling tool

Server platform

Eclipse supports development for Tomcat,

GlassFish GlassFish is an open-source Jakarta EE platform application server project started by Sun Microsystems, then sponsored by Oracle Corporation, and now living at the Eclipse Foundation and supported by OmniFish, Fujitsu and Payara. The support ...

and many other servers and is often capable of installing the required server (for development) directly from the IDE. It supports remote debugging, allowing a user to watch variables and step through the code of an application that is running on the attached server.

Web Tools Platform

The Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project is an extension of the Eclipse platform with tools for developing Web and Java EE applications. It includes source and graphical editors for a variety of languages, wizards and built-in applications to simplify development, and tools and APIs to support deploying, running, and testing apps.

Modeling platform

The Modeling project contains all the official projects of the Eclipse Foundation focusing on model-based development technologies. All are compatible with the Eclipse Modeling Framework created by IBM. Those projects are separated into six categories: * Model Transformation includes projects using Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)-based models as an input to produce either a model or text as an output. Model-to-model transformation projects include ATLAS Transformation Language (ATL), an open source transformation language and toolkit used to transform a given model or to generate a new model from a given EMF model. Model-to-text transformation projects contain Acceleo, an implementation of MOFM2T, a standard model to text language from the

Object Management Group The Object Management Group (OMG®) is a computer industry Standards Development Organization (SDO), or Voluntary Consensus Standards Body (VCSB). OMG develops enterprise integration and modeling standards for a range of technologies. Busin ...

(OMG). The Acceleo code generator can generate any textual language (Java, PHP, Python, etc.) from EMF-based models defined with any metamodel (

(UML), Systems Modeling Language (SysML), etc.). It is open-source. *Model Development Tools include projects implementating various modeling standards used in the industry, and their toolkits. Among those projects can be found implementations of several standards: **

(UML) ** Systems modeling language (SysML) **

Object Constraint Language The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is a declarative language describing rules applying to Unified Modeling Language (UML) models developed at IBM and is now part of the UML standard. Initially, OCL was merely a formal specification language ext ...

(OCL) ** Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) **

Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is an adopted standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) intended to be the basis for formal and detailed natural language declarative description of a complex entity, such as a bus ...

(SBVR) **

XML Schema An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constrai ...

(XSD) ** National Electronic Distributors Association (NEDA) ** Model-to-Model Transformations (MMT) *Concrete Syntax Development contains the Graphical Modeling Framework, an Eclipse-based framework dedicated to the graphical representation of EMF-based models. *Abstract Syntax Development hosts the Eclipse Modeling Framework, core of most modeling projects of the Eclipse Foundation and frameworks available for the EMF like Connected Data Objects (CDO), EMF query or EMF validation. * Technology and Research includes modeling project prototypes, hosting all Eclipse Foundation modeling projects during their incubation phase. *Amalgam provides the packaging and integration between all available modeling tools for the Eclipse package dedicated to modeling tools.

Application lifecycle management

Application lifecycle management Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the product lifecycle management (governance, development, and maintenance) of computer programs. It encompasses requirements management, software architecture, computer programming, software testing, ...

(ALM) and task management in Eclipse need an optional component called Mylyn (), an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

implementation of the task-focused interface. It provides an API for tools embedding the task-focused interface. For software developers, it helps a developer work efficiently with many different tasks (such as bugs, problem reports or new features). Tasks are integrated into Mylyn. For all tasks that have been integrated, Mylyn monitors user activity and tries to identify information relevant to the task at hand. It uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the related information. Mylyn can integrate with repositories such as Bugzilla,

Trac Trac is an open-source, web-based project management and bug tracking system. It has been adopted by a variety of organizations for use as a bug tracking system for both free and open-source software and proprietary projects and products. Tr ...

, Redmine, Mantis, JIRA, Unfuddle, and

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

. It focuses on improving productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation. By making task context explicit, Mylyn is also meant to facilitate multitasking, planning, reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise. The project name comes from

myelin Myelin Sheath ( ) is a lipid-rich material that in most vertebrates surrounds the axons of neurons to insulate them and increase the rate at which electrical impulses (called action potentials) pass along the axon. The myelinated axon can be lik ...

, an electrically insulating layer that surrounds neurons' axons. The original name of this project, "Mylar", replicated a trademark of a boPET film company, so the

changed the project name.

Features

Eclipse IDE features include text editor with syntax coloring, coding assistance,

code completion Code completion is an autocompletion feature in many integrated development environments (IDEs) that speeds up the process of coding applications by fixing common mistakes and suggesting lines of code. This usually happens through popups while typ ...

code refactoring In computer programming and software design, code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing source code—changing the '' factoring''—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring is intended to improve the design, structure, ...

, code analysis with "Quick fix" suggestions along with code debugging. Along with native support for OSGi, JPMS support has been added as of Java 9.

Extensions

Eclipse supports a rich selection of extensions, adding support for Python via PyDev, Android development via Google's ADT (superseded by

Android Studio Android Studio is the official integrated development environment (IDE) for Google's Android operating system, built on JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA software and designed specifically for Android development. This is available for download on W ...

since 2015), JavaFX via e(fx)clipse,

, jQuery, and many others at the Eclipse Marketplace. Valable is a Vala plug-in for Eclipse. In addition to the built-in Java compiler warnings, additional plug-ins are available for linting to improve code quality and consistency such as SpotBugs and Sonar. Support for build tools such as

Ant Ants are Eusociality, eusocial insects of the Family (biology), family Formicidae and, along with the related wasps and bees, belong to the Taxonomy (biology), order Hymenoptera. Ants evolved from Vespoidea, vespoid wasp ancestors in the Cre ...

, Maven, Make, and CMake includes the capability to replace Eclipse native project file format with Maven pom.xml directly.

Alternative distributions

Several alternative distributions exist in the Eclipse project.

PHP Development Tools

The PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) Development Tools project provides a framework for the Eclipse platform. The project encompasses all development components, including code-completion, develop PHP and facilitate extensibility. It leverages the existing Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) and Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK).

Android Development Tools

Android Development Tools (ADT) was superseded in 2015 by the Eclipse foundation's own plugin, called Andmore: Development Tools for Android, after Google discontinued development of their plug-in for the Eclipse IDE, that is designed to provide an integrated environment in which to build Android applications. ADT/Andmore extends the abilities of Eclipse to let developers set up new Android projects, create an application UI, add packages based on the Android Framework API, debug their applications using the Android SDK tools, and export signed (or unsigned) .apk files in order to distribute their applications. It is freely available to download. Google's ADT was the official IDE for Android until 2015 but was replaced by Eclipse's Andmore and the official

. As of 2024, the project appears to be moribund, with no activity since 2017.

Notes

References

Sources

* * * * *

External links

* * *
Eclipse Foundation Press Releases
on eclipse.org
Eclipse Foundation 2006 Press Releases Archive
on eclipse.org

on eclipse.org {{DEFAULTSORT:Eclipse (Software) Android (operating system) development software Code navigation tools Cross-platform free software Debuggers Formerly proprietary software Free HTML editors Free integrated development environments Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Free UML tools IBM software Integrated development environments Java development tools Java platform Linux integrated development environments Linux programming tools Linux software MacOS programming tools MacOS text editors Programming tools for Windows Software development kits Software using the Eclipse Public License