Книга: Embedded Linux development using Eclipse

1.5 What Can You Do With Eclipse?

1.5 What Can You Do With Eclipse?

The Eclipse platform is potentially useful for just about any software development task you can imagine. The Eclipse Foundation organizes its range of projects and sub-projects under what it calls the “Pillars of Eclipse.” These include:

• Enterprise development. Tools and frameworks that span the entire software development lifecycle, including modeling, development, deployment tools, reporting, data manipulation, testing, and profiling. Projects under this pillar include: Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT), Data Tools, Test and Performance Tools, and Web Tools.

• Embedded and device development. This is the area of immediate concern in this book. The projects under this pillar support building embedded applications as well as tools that assist with target management, device debugging, and building GUIs for mobile devices. These include: Device Software Development Platform, Embedded Rich Client Platform, Mobile Tools for Java, Native Application Builder, Target Management, and C/C++ IDE.

• Rich client platform (RCP). This is a platform for building and deploying so-called “rich client” applications with facilities for deploying native GUI applications to a variety of desktop operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. Under this pillar we find Equinox, a component framework based on the OSGi standard, along with the Plug-in Development Environment, Visual Editor, and the Eclipse platform itself.

• Application frameworks. A number of Eclipse projects provide frameworks that can be used as functional building blocks to accelerate the software development process. Unlike developer tools, application frameworks are deployed with the actual applications. Frameworks can be used either as standalone additions to Java applications, or can be leveraged as components on top of the Eclipse RCP. This supports the use of an integrated stack of open source frameworks on RCP to quickly build and deploy applications. Frameworks include: Eclipse Modeling, Graphical Modeling, Tool Services, Eclipse Communication, and Eclipse Process. BIRT and Data Tools from the Enterprise pillar are also included here.

• Language IDE. In addition to Java and C/C++, the Eclipse Foundation supports language IDE projects for Cobol and PHP. Third party plug-ins support a wide range of other languages such as MatLab, Ruby and Rails, Perl, and Python.

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