Книга: Embedded Linux development using Eclipse
1.4 So What Is Eclipse, Anyway?
Eclipse itself is not an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Rather it is a collection of frameworks and tools for building IDEs and complex “rich-client” applications. The Eclipse Foundation’s website describes it as “an extensible development platform, runtimes and application frameworks for building, deploying and managing software across the entire software lifecycle.” One early technical overview paper described it thus: “The Eclipse Platform is an IDE for anything, and for nothing in particular.”
Although Eclipse has a lot of built-in functionality, most of that functionality is very generic. It takes additional tools to extend the platform to work with new content types, to do new things with existing content types, and to focus the generic functionality on a specific task.
Eclipse is largely written in Java, and was originally developed for it. Consequently, it runs on any machine with a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Figure 1.1 shows the platform’s major components and APIs. The platform’s principal role is to provide tool developers with mechanisms to use, and rules to follow, for creating seamlessly integrated tools. These mechanisms are exposed via well defined API interfaces, classes, and methods. The platform also provides useful building blocks and frameworks that facilitate developing new tools.
Figure 1.1: Elements of Eclipse.
Eclipse is designed and built to meet the following requirements:
• Support the construction of a variety of tools for application development.
• Support an unrestricted set of tool providers, including independent software vendors (ISVs).
• Support tools to manipulate arbitrary content types such as HTML, Java, C, JSP, EJB, XML, and GIF.
• Facilitate seamless integration of tools within and across different content types and tool providers.
• Support both GUI and non-GUI-based application development environments.
• Run on a wide range of operating systems, including Windows and Linux.
• Capitalize on the popularity of the Java programming language for writing tools.
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