Eclipse
Background
The following is taken from the eclipse.org:
Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle.
Eclipse projects are based on the Eclipse platform, which instantiates the Container-Component architecture.
In this architecture the container (the Eclipse platform) manages components (plugins) that can be developed by third parties.
Most people think of Eclipse as an integrated development environment (IDE). In fact, the Eclipse IDE is just a plugin (JDT) managed by the Eclipse platform:
Of course plugins can be mini-containers that manage their own set of plugins. Therefore the JDT can manage plugins specific to development.
Eclipse Concepts
The Eclipse desktop window is called a workbench.
A workbench contains one or more perspectives.
Perspectives contain views and editors:
A perspective provides an initial layout of related views and controls that perform a particular task. Examples of perspectives include:
A view provides a view of a project, file, or activity. Here are some views:
The workbench manages a collection of resources. Resources include projects, files, and directories:
A project is a collection of resources such as files and directories.
The Labs
The following labs have two goals: they provide a quick review of Java while showing how the important features of the Eclipse JDT.
Developing a Console User Interface
Developing a Graphical User Interface
References
OSGi Standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSGi)
Eclipse Foundation (http://www.eclipse.org/)
Download Eclipse for J2SE developers (http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/)