Many developers tout Eclipse as having the best of both worlds: a good Integrated Development Environment (IDE) in Java Development Tools (JDT), and a good development framework. It is currently the most popular Java IDE on the market, but Sun Microsystems is using its NetBeans 5.5 IDE to challenge Eclipse's dominance. Although Sun's marketing machine is now revving up, Java developers can anticipate a long night's journey for NetBeans before it sees the light of day as the top Java IDE.

Shedding Light on Eclipse

Eclipse has it all as far as Java-based architects and developers are concerned. Eclipse is an open-source community that focuses on building projects based on the open Eclipse platform. The Eclipse platform itself is extensible and open, and is in use both as a software development environment and as an application development framework.

As an IDE, Eclipse provides a common user interface so that developers...