Glossary of Eclipse Terms

By Paulo Merson

Eclipse is an open source project coordinated by IBM. Besides a tool, it is a runtime environment where one can create and deploy new components (plug-ins). Using Eclipse and developing plug-ins involve familiarization with several different terms.
The glossary below tries to list most relevant terms used by plug-in developers.


Action
Bookmark
Collector view
 A kind of view use to collect particular artifacts. Examples: Tasks, Bookmarks.
Contribution
Core
Detail view
 See Information view


Eclipse rules
 See Rules
Eclipse platform
 See Platform
Editor See picture.
Extension point
Feature
 A feature is a unit of download and installation consisting of one or more plug-ins. It is easier to package and deploy an Eclipse application that contains several plug-ins by creating a feature--the alternative would be to package and deploy each plug-in separately.
One can see the installed features in Eclipse selecting Help | About Eclipse Platform | Feature Details.
Features are stored in folder  eclipse/features
Feature plug-in
 One of the plug-ins in a feature should be the "feature plug-in."  It has the same name of the feature and contains additional information used by the feature: about.ini file that defines information in the about page, splash.bmp, welcome page, help pages.
Information view
 A kind of view used to show detailed information about an object selected in another view. Example: Properties.
JFace
Marker
Navigator view
 A kind of view that shows a hierarchical tree structure of different elements. Example: Package explorer (hierarchy of Java packages), Navigator (tree of resources), Type Hierarchy (hierarchy of Java classes and interfaces).
Outline view
 A kind of view that is used to show the structure of the element that is in the active editor.
Output view
 A kind of view that shows the results of an operation. Examples: Search (search results), Console (output of application execution), JUnit (results of a test run).
Page
 See workbench page.
Part
 See workbench part.
Perspective
Platform
Plug-in
Primary feature
 One of the installed features can be tagged as the primary feature. The primary feature defines the "branding" of an Eclipse application--splash screen, welcome page, about box. The primary feature is defined by entry "feature.default.id" in the install.ini file located in the root folder of the Eclipse installation.
Project
Resource
Result view
 See output view.
Rules
Runtime
SWT
Table view
Task
View A view is a window within a workbench page. Modifications made in a view saved immediately (in contrast to an editor, which typically follows a open-save-close lifecycle). A view is used to display and manipulate information in different formats and therefore there are different kinds of views: navigator view (aka explorer view), outline view, output view (aka result view), table view, information view (aka properties or detail view). See picture.
Window
Wizard
 In Eclipse, a wizard is a sequence of one or more dialog boxes activated by the New menu option. Examples: New Project, New Class, etc.
Workbench
 The entire Eclipse UI is the workbench. Internally, the workbench is a single root object that contains the menu bar, tool bar, perspective bar, status line and a main area for displaying pages containing workbench parts. Only one page can be active at a time.  See picture.
Workbench page
 A page can contaion 0 or more workbench parts.
Workbench part
 A workbench part can be a view or an editor.  
Workbenc window
 See workbench.
Workspace The workspace is in practice a folder in the disk. There is only one workspace per running instance of Eclipse. All resources exist within that one workspace. Thus, projects are created withina workspace.






References:


If you want to contribute an entry to this glossary, please send me an e-mail!


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