- FAQ 1: What is Eclipse?
- FAQ 2: What is the Eclipse Platform?
- FAQ 3: Where did Eclipse come from?
- FAQ 4: What is the Eclipse Foundation?
- FAQ 5: How can my users tell where Eclipse ends and a product starts?
- FAQ 6: What are Eclipse projects and technologies?
- FAQ 7: How do I propose my own project?
- FAQ 8: Who is building commercial products based on Eclipse?
- FAQ 9: What open source projects are based on Eclipse?
- FAQ 10: What academic research projects are based on Eclipse?
- FAQ 11: Who uses Eclipse in the classroom?
- FAQ 12: What is an Eclipse Innovation Grant?
- FAQ 13: What Eclipse newsgroups are available?
- FAQ 14: How do I get access to Eclipse newsgroups?
- FAQ 15: What Eclipse mailing lists are available?
- FAQ 16: What articles on Eclipse have been written?
- FAQ 17: What books have been written on Eclipse?
- FAQ 18: How do I report a bug in Eclipse?
- FAQ 19: How can I search the existing list of bugs in Eclipse?
- FAQ 20: What do I do if my feature request is ignored?
- FAQ 21: Can I get my documentation in PDF form, please?
- FAQ 22: Where do I find documentation for a given extension point?
- FAQ 23: How is Eclipse licensed?
FAQ 5: How can my users tell where Eclipse ends and a product starts?
You cannot see where Eclipse ends and a product starts, and this is intentional. The platform itself is written entirely as a set of plug-ins, and the product plug-ins simply join the “soup of swimming plug-ins.” To bring some order to the chaos, the platform does maintain a history of configurations. When a new plug-in is installed, a new configuration is created. To obtain insights into the current configuration of the platform and its update history, consult either Help > About... > Configuration Details or the Update Manager. There you can discover the installed plug-ins that are part of the Eclipse Platform and those that were installed afterward.
Having said that, an Eclipse-based product can exert a certain amount of branding on the appearance of the final application. In particular, a product will usually replace the workbench window icon and splash screen. The product can also configure a set of preferences that will ship as the defaults for users of that product. See Chapter 14 for more details on productizing an Eclipse offering.