Celebrating 10 years of Eclipse

10 years back another visionary decision was taken by IBM , by donating its $40 million worth of source code from Websphere Studio Workbench and forming the Eclipse Consortium. This initiation was actually taken by IBM in November 2001 with the goals of creating a “commercial industry standard , full featured, highly integrable architecture” IDE.

In January 2004, the Eclipse Foundation was started as an non profit organization to have a vendor neutral, transparent and open community. Furthermore in June 2004 Eclipse Foundation announced general availability of the royalty-free 3.0 release of the Eclipse Platform. This became a fantastic achievement of open source community as well as the java language itself. In September 30, 2004 J2SE 5.0 was released which is much powerful with much more features and I strongly believe that the release of eclipse 3.0 helped indirectly as another fact to its success story.

Why Eclipse so popular ?

• Architecture of Eclipse IDE is easily and massively extensible, so any number of development features and functionality can be included for the requirement.
  
  • instead of hard coding applications functionality eclipse uses an implementation of OSGi that employs plugins to provide the functionality.
    
  • Wide range of plugins also available which run on top its runtime system as well as inside the runtime system.
    
• Using, modifying distributing of Eclipse doesn't need to be paid. Eclipse releases under Eclipse Public License so it allows to do any of the above.
  
• Eclipse IDE available for many operating systems
  
• Eclipse IDE is advance as much as or more than any other commercial IDEs available in the market.
  
  • Many features has integrated to it
    
  • Frequent updates and research on going for new features and functionality
    
  • available not just for java also other languages like C/C++, cobol, php, pearl, python etc.
    

Where Eclipse stands today ?

After 10 years time Eclipse has achieved a major improvement and market share. Accomplishments that eclipse has gained is incredible and the community will be proud of them self silently. In terms of market share eclipse has achieved approximate figure of 65% considering all the java developers.

Eclipse foundation itself is a large community which consist more than 200 open source projects and more than 1000 committers. Also a considerable number of partner companies existing including featured partners like IBM, Nokia, SAP etc.