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FAQ What are Eclipse projects and technologies?
The Eclipse Foundation oversees a lot of activity, with contributors numbering in the hundreds. To organize these activities, Eclipse is divided into projects and subprojects. The four main Eclipse projects in June 2004 were:
The "Eclipse Project"
The unfortunately named "Eclipse Project" is the project dedicated to producing the Eclipse SDK, a full-featured Java IDE with all the necessary features for building Eclipse plug-ins. The Eclipse SDK is what much of the wider software development community equates with the term Eclipse. The name "Eclipse Project" made sense back when there were only two or three projects at Eclipse, but now it is frequently referred to as the "Eclipse top-level project" to reduce confusion. The three outputs of this project are the Eclipse Platform, Java development tools (JDT) and Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) tools.
The Eclipse Tools Project
Examples of development tools based on Eclipse are tools for visual editing, C/C++ development, UML development, quality assurance (QA), graphical editing, modeling, profiling, and even COBOL.
The Eclipse Technologies Project
Projects in this category are oriented toward research and experimentation into future directions for the platform. These projects are not always intended to become part of products today but instead to explore cutting-edge ideas for future Eclipse-based products. Some of these projects, such as the Equinox project to develop a new Eclipse runtime infrastructure, may migrate into the base platform or other core projects. Topics include aspect-oriented programming, collaborative development environments, Eclipse education, and the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi).
The Eclipse Web Tools Platform
This project to develop tools for J2EE™ is still in its infancy, but has generated a great deal of excitement about its potential to lay the groundwork for high-quality, interoperable development tools for building Web applications.
This FAQ was originally published in Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs. Copyright 2004, Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. This text is made available here under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0.