What is Eclipse?

Eclipse means a lot of different things to different people. To some Eclipse is a free, state-of-the-art Java development environment. To others, Eclipse is a flexible environment to experiment with new computer languages or extensions to existing languages. To yet others, Eclipse is a comprehensive framework that deploys many advanced and modern software design and implementation techniques. Eclipse is open because its design allows for easy extension by third parties. It is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) because it provides tooling to manage workspaces; to build, launch and debug applications; to share artifacts with a team and to version code; and to easily customize the programming experience. Eclipse is a platform because it is not a finished application per se but is designed to be extended indefinitely with more and more sophisticated tooling. The platform has no explicit or implicit support whatsoever for Java development as provided by the Java development tools (JDT). The JDT has to play according to the same rules as all the other plug-ins that use the platform.