The market-share leader among Java IDEs is unquestionably Eclipse, the platform freely available from the Eclipse Foundation. Its success stems from several factors: the foundation's vendor independence, its considerable ability to forge partnerships, and a key product design decision.
Just before the 2004 release of Version 3.0 of the IDE, IBM—then-owner of Eclipse—decided to migrate the platform to a new plug-in architecture called Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi). The OSGi framework provides the automotive industry with a simple, reliable software backplane for plugging in modules to customize features of various car models on the market today. By choosing OSGi, Eclipse gave developers an elegant and well-designed plug-in interface. Since that release, hundreds of plug-ins have come to market and greatly expanded the capabilities of Eclipse. Since that release, many plug-ins have come to market and expanded the capabilities of Eclipse.
Genuitec has been active in porting and developing the plug-ins for Eclipse, and it just released Version 5.0 of its signature product, MyEclipse. This productised collection of plug-ins expands Eclipse functionality at a competitive price.
