Eclipse
"Eclipse is a platform that has been designed from the ground up for building integrated web and application development tooling. By design, the platform does not provide a great deal of end user functionality by itself. The value of the platform is what it encourages: rapid development of integrated features based on a plug-in model.
Eclipse provides a common user interface (UI) model for working with tools. It is designed to run on multiple operating systems while providing robust integration with each underlying OS. Plug-ins can program to the Eclipse portable APIs and run unchanged on any of the supported operating systems.
At the core of Eclipse is an architecture for dynamic discovery, loading, and running of plug-ins. The platform handles the logistics of finding and running the right code. The platform UI provides a standard user navigation model. Each plug-in can then focus on doing a small number of tasks well. What kinds of tasks? Defining, testing, animating, publishing, compiling, debugging, diagramming...the only limit is your imagination."
