AOSA: Eclipse Review

(this is a review of the chapter on Eclipse in the Architecture of Open Source Applications)

Eclipse was the second IDE (the first was Turbo C++) I was ever introduced to. We used it during our first undergraduate computer science course to code in Java. I remember being blown away by how powerful it was, and how easy it made learning a new language. Even though I’ve switched to using IntelliJ IDEA for Java/Scala now, Eclipse still holds a special place in my heart.

The chapter on Eclipse is very well written and offers readers a glimpse into why Eclipse is the way it is, and why certain design decisions (like writing their own Java compiler) were made. The component and plugin based architecture used by Eclipse seems to be extremely flexible and easy to add new features to. The compatibility layer provided by the team for each new major release of Eclipse (so that plugins written against the older versions still work in the new version) is a great move by the team to iterate on the internals (and externals in the case of public APIs) while preserving the ecosystem of plugins that already exist. I particularly enjoyed the section on “Rich Client Platform (RCP)” that talks about how people used portions of Eclipse to build other, non-IDE, applications. Incremental builds is one of my favorite features of Eclipse and learning how that worked was quite satisfying as well.

Things I learned about –

• OSGi
• Native and emulated widget toolkits

Key takeaways –

• Having a good API is paramount in others adopting or contributing to your software
• Components are very powerful