Top 5 reasons to use Eclipse

A group of Eclipse enthusiasts along with few Indian University students discussed on “Why many use Eclipse ? “. Here are the TOP 5 reasons. Due to lack of time, i am making this blog very short.

• Easy to Use : As a user/developer/tool developer/customer, we find it easy to use. The fact that MANY adopted Eclipse and they love it says that Eclipse has “something” that others don’t.
• Platform : Eclipse is designed and coded for stability and re usability. They exactly know the problems tools developers would face (or are facing). It has stable APIs that works and anyone can reuse MOST of what Eclipse uses. Eclipse provides the building blocs with a strong foundation that others can build on. A Real Platform.
• Community : The fact that Eclipse made a complete successful Eco system of consumers and producers of the Eclipse Plugins and various other technologies makes it interdependent and trustworthy. We observe a lot of integrity and timely help among the community members.
• Documentation and Examples : Developers, Customers and others… who wants to try something using Eclipse needs an entry point. Something they can start with and “feel good”. This entry point could be documentation or examples or code snippets. We need something that you can refer to and it takes you few steps ahead in solving your problem.
• Free and Open Source : Well, these things do matter now and Free helps you to easily access something. Free, lets you try out and not regret about the decision. If you like it, continue… else throw it in recycle bin. Open Source helps us to feel confident, explore new areas by extending the functionality, independence from the vendor,  etc… If something worse or annoying happens, you can fix it yourself.

To conclude, Eclipse just works. Human brain works with some assumptions and pre-conditions to achieve a task. It is good feeling for any human being to ” get what you expect” and “when it happens exactly how you imagined”. That’s what Eclipse did. Can’ wait to test drive Helios.

Other references…

• Top 10 reasons to use eclipse…

• Eclipse as a Platform

• Announcing : Bay Area Eclipse Regional Community