This page is intended as starting point for contributions to
the Eclipse IDE or Rich Client Platform (RCP)
Eclipse® is famous for being an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the Java® programming language but is also well capable of other languages like C/C++, JavaScript or TypeScript, to just name a few. At its core Eclipse is a highly extensible platform and a comprehensive set of frameworks and common services that collectively provide a powerful software development infrastructure used for numerous free and open as well as for commercial products and applications.
Thank you for your interest: contributions are more than welcome!
The CONTRIBUTING section provides the information to guide you through the contribution process, after you have identified the project you want to contribute to.
Users of the Eclipse IDE should visit eclipseide.org
This section aims to familiarise you with the general structure of Eclipse to help you identifying the repositories you want to report issues or contribute to. To find the projects of your interested see the Project Discovery Guide.
First of all there is not one single Eclipse IDE or a single Eclipse IDE project.
In general the Eclipse IDE is organized into numerous independent Eclipse projects.
Each project can contribute multiple components to an IDE.
The components of Eclipse are called Plug-ins and are grouped into Features.
Most active projects release quarterly at the same time in a coordinated processes called the Simultaneous Release.
The Eclipse Download page provides various predefined Eclipse IDE Packages, each of them bundling a different set of Features and Plug-ins from the corresponding SimRel. Users can further customize their Eclipse IDE by installing more Features/Plug-ins from the Simultaneous Release Repository, the Eclipse Marketplace or just any p2-repository available to them. Undesired Features can also be uninstalled.
🌐 Eclipse-Platform contains the core code that powers Eclipse as a Rich Client Platform (RCP), which is used to build powerful desktop applications, no matter the type of app.
💻 JDT is all about the tools for developing Java within the IDE, making Java development smooth and efficient.
🔄 EGit provides all the tools needed to work with Git version control, essential for collaboration in open source projects.
🔌 PDE focuses on developing plug-ins for Eclipse, allowing users to extend its functionality in new and exciting ways.
🔨 M2E integrates the Maven build tool into Eclipse, enabling seamless configuration and execution of Maven builds.
The Eclipse IDE is an Eclipse Community project and as such obeys the governance rules described in the Eclipse Foundation Development Process to guarantee meritocracy, diversity, vendor-neutrality and business-friendliness.
Please bear in mind that the Eclipse IDE as a whole and the contributing projects are often developed by volunteers and the Eclipse IDE is not a product you have contracted for. As a result, the committers may not be able to take care of some support requests. However, as part of the Eclipse Foundation development process, committers are committed to review incoming code contributions. If you do not provide the fix/implementation yourself (or pay someone to do it for you), a bug you reported might never get fixed. If it is a serious bug, other people than you might care enough to provide a fix. As a consequence of all this, the only way to ensure that a bug gets fixed, or a feature gets implemented, is to contribute it yourself, and convince a committer that the change you are submitting is in the best interest of the project.
As you contribute more and more, you will eventually be nominated as a committer for the project.
If you need more help:
Comprehensive technical documentation of the different components can be found at
