The Eclipse platform is one of the world's most successful open source software projects. Millions of developers use Eclipse every day as their development tools. Millions of people use applications built on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform every day. The Eclipse community has hundreds of dedicated committers and thousands of contributors. Speaking on their behalf, I thank you for your interest in Eclipse, and wish you great success building your project with our free software platform. This book will provide you with an excellent introduction to the key aspects of the Eclipse platform, including the plug-in model, SWT, JFace, user interactions, and resources.
The success of the Eclipse platform has been based to a very large extent on its extensibility. Originally conceived as a platform for building integrated development environments, Eclipse quickly evolved into a platform for building portable desktop applications as well. For over a decade, the Eclipse Rich Client Platform has been one of the leading technologies for creating compelling user interfaces for business applications. The major refresh of the Eclipse application platform that came in 2012 with the launch of Eclipse 4 has seen even further adoption. The chapters on Eclipse 4 and styling your user interface do an excellent job of portraying those new features.
Eclipse projects are driven by great developers, and the Eclipse 4 project has had many important contributors. I would like to recognize the contributions of just a few: the present Eclipse platform leader Mike Wilson (IBM), and project leaders Dani Megert (IBM) and Lars Vogel (vogella), and past leaders John Arthorne (formerly IBM, now Shopify), and Boris Bokowski (formerly IBM, now Google). I would also like to recognize the special contributions to Eclipse 4 of Brian de Alwis, Oleg Besedin, Danail Branekov, Eric Moffatt, Bogdan Gheorghe, Paul Webster, Thomas Schindl, Remy Suen, Kai Tödter, and Lars Vogel.
As an open source product, Eclipse owes its success to the contributions of many people. I highly encourage everyone to follow the chapter on contributing to the Eclipse platform. The Eclipse community is a worldwide phenomenon, and we would love to welcome your contributions.
Alex Blewitt has been actively involved in the Eclipse community for many years. His knowledge of both the Eclipse platform and plug-in development is second to none. He has written an in-depth and fun-to-read introduction to plug-in development that I am sure will help many to build, test, deploy, and update their Eclipse-based products or applications. I am sure that you will find it to be an excellent addition to your Eclipse library.
Mike Milinkovich
Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation