Eclipse is supported by IBM. Similar to NetBeans, it is also a platform for rich client application and it is built around the OSGi container architecture, which itself is a topic that can fill a book like this. Most of the developers use Eclipse and, almost exclusively, it is the choice when developers create code for the IBM WebSphere application server. The Eclipse special version contains a developer version of WebSphere.

Eclipse also has plugins to support different programming languages and also has different variations similar to NetBeans. The variations are plugins prepackaged with the basic IDE.