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Difference between revisions of "FAQ Where did Eclipse come from?"
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Eclipse started out as proprietary technology, led by IBM’s subsidiary, Object | Eclipse started out as proprietary technology, led by IBM’s subsidiary, Object | ||
Technology International (OTI). IBM wanted to reduce the large number of incompatible development | Technology International (OTI). IBM wanted to reduce the large number of incompatible development |
Revision as of 14:27, 14 March 2006
Eclipse started out as proprietary technology, led by IBM’s subsidiary, Object Technology International (OTI). IBM wanted to reduce the large number of incompatible development environments being offered to its customers and to increase the reuse of the common components in those environments. By using the same common framework, development teams could leverage one another’s components, integrate to a high degree, and allow developers to roam among projects.
Eclipse did not emerge from thin air but evolved from a long product line of development
environments, of which the earlier ones are IBM VisualAge for
Smalltalk™ and IBM VisualAge for Java™. Both of these products were written in Smalltalk.
The IBM VisualAge Micro Edition™ product was the first
serious—and actually quite successful—experiment with writing the entire IDE in Java. Many concepts found in Eclipse have
been tried out in that product already. However, for third parties, it proved difficult to
extend the product with new components, mainly for two reasons: (1) it was
not designed with a component model in mind, and (2) it essentially was a monolithic,
closed-source product.
A small team of experts set out to take the experiences of the previous years of
designing and implementing development environments. The result was Eclipse,
a platform designed from the ground up as an integration platform for development
tools. It enabled partners to easily extend products built on it, using the plug-in
mechanisms provided by the platform. The subsequent path to open source and
enabling of a much wider audience and ecosystem was a natural progression.
The Eclipse open source project was announced in November 2001 by a group
of companies that formed the initial Eclipse Consortium. From there, the small
initial project burgeoned into a collection of related projects that formed the basis
of dozens of commercial applications.