Basics Concepts

Eclipse is an open source community with over 60 open source projects. These projects can be conceptually organized into different "pillars" or categories such as:

Contents

Concepts

Workbench

The term Workbench refers to the desktop development environment. The Workbench aims to achieve seamless tool integration and controlled openness by providing a common paradigm for the creation, management, and navigation of workspace resources.

Resources

Resources is a collective term for the projects, folders, and files that exist in the Workbench. The navigation views provide a hierarchical view of resources and allows you to open them for editing.

Perspectives

Each Workbench window contains one or more perspectives. A perspective defines the initial set and layout of views in the Workbench window. Within the window, each perspective shares the same set of editors. Each perspective provides a set of functionality aimed at accomplishing a specific type of task or works with specific types of resources.

Editors

Most perspectives in the Workbench are comprised of an editor area and one or more views.

Views

Views support editors and provide alternative presentations as well as ways to navigate the information in your Workbench.

Eclipse IDE Tutorial

Eclipse as a Java IDE