What you may not know

What you may not know about Eclipse. (Demo 2004 Series 10) If you are a Java developer and you haven't checked out the Eclipse Development tool from www.eclipse.org, then you owe yourself a treat. Who knows if you get excited about that kind of thing, but it gives me chills. Here are some claims to fame:

It's free.

It's open source

It's as good as better as that paragon of tools Microsoft Visual Studio

It's fast

It's visually stunning as a Windows desktop application

And … It's written in Java!

Check it out, you won't be sorry. **But that 's not really the topic of this post. **

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Back at Demo 2004,mValent demonstrated a unique tool for the configuration and change management of complex of n-tier enterprise system deployments. An arcane area to be sure, but a great product.

Back to Eclipse though: For me this product is especially interesting to me because it illustrates a unique and little known capability of the Eclipse system, which is it's use as a wonderful application framework. They've done this by abstracting the IDE model to a level where it can be used for a variety of tools and applications which otherwise would have to start from scratch.

mValent is the existance proof: Here's a sophisticated application which uses the Eclipse Framework – and which itself is not an IDE! Beautiful!