I’ve been working with Eclipse now for a couple of years. At first I really had trouble understanding Eclipse. Most of us new to Eclipse do. At first I was perceiving Eclipse as just another text editor where you could just drag a source file into Eclipse for a quick edit. I was always quite upset when doing something, seemingly as simple, as this didn’t seem to be that easy.
Over the years I’ve come to understand Eclipse for what it really is. A Rich Applications Platform. Many among us still think of or see Eclipse as a development tool. And while this is true, the development tool that is Eclipse is in fact just a Rich Application that runs on top of Eclipse.
With this knowledge we can start taking Eclipse to a completely new level. Let me give you an example. Nowadays it’s quite common to have a web based CMS system. The problem with web based applications, like a CMS system, is usually not so much of what is technically possible but just the shear amount of time it takes to build them. If you build a web based application you’d easily spend 80% of your time building the UI (the HTML, CSS and JavaScript). Why not build this CMS application as an Eclipse application? If you do so, you don’t have to worry about any real visual design (on which everyone has a opinion) because your application will use the Eclipse UI.
A CMS can still be considered a development tool. What if we take it another step further. An Office suite that runs inside Eclipse. This may sound silly at first first but imagine the possibilities. Your application is not only cross platform but also update-able through the internet through a well proven mechanism. And you can even integrate it with other applications that run on Eclipse because of the unified interface that Eclipse provides.
And while we’re at it. Why not port Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and the whole bunch to the Eclipse platform? It could very well be that this is where its going. Is Eclipse going to be the application platform of the future?