Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs

Foreword

As Chris and John describe later in this book, the Eclipse Project began in 1999 at IBM’s Object Technology International (OTI) subsidiary. At the time I was CEO and president of OTI and so was very involved in the decision to proceed with Eclipse, which was initially conceived as a successor product to the VisualAge family of software development tools. VisualAge, especially VisualAge for Java, was a commercially successful IDE. But it was also a closed environment built on proprietary APIs and did not integrate well with other vendors’ tools. Only the IBM/OTI team could enhance or extend the product. Beyond these issues, though, it was becoming apparent from customer feedback that more was required than a simple rewrite of VisualAge. ...