Eclipse is an open source platform with many vendors behind it. IBM started this initiative in response to take on SUN in IDE market and compete with their offerings in this space now known as Netbeans. Its name came from Lunar Solar Eclipse (hint: think of what happens to Sun during Lunar Solar Eclipse).


I started using Eclipse 2.x in 2002 and than published this popular Tutorial on Building J2EE Applications using Eclipse, JBoss and Lomboz as my contribution to giving back to opensource community. Since than Eclipse (platform) has come a long way . Its now one of the most popular platform for software development, esp in Java, J2EE development. Strictly speaking it is not an IDE, it is a platform which allows you to plugin and play various components according to to your technical needs. Most of the plugins offered are opensource, but some companies have SAAS model for their plugin distributions, like MyEclipse.

To give you an insight on how eclipse IDE cum platform is used I have compiled a list of top ten popular plugin used.

  1. Spring IDE
  2. MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench
  3. Mylyn
  4. Hibernate Synchronizer
  5. Azzurri Clay - Database Modeling in Eclipse
  6. FreeMarker IDE
  7. J2EE Spider
  8. WindowBuilder Pro - SWT/Swing/GWT Designer
  9. Jigloo SWT/Swing GUI Builder
  10. Checkstyle Plug-in
Other useful tips

Update : Thanks to Nick Brown for pointing out my mistake on Lunar Eclipse
reference which i meant to be Solar Eclipse. Now links are added as well. Thanks for your feedback and comments, keep them coming :-) Del.icio.us Digg! My StumbleUpon Page