The Eclipse 3.0 platform: adopting OSGi technology

From its inception Eclipse was mainly designed to be a tooling platform, but with Version 3.0, Eclipse is now evolving toward a Rich Client Platform (RCP). This change, driven by the open-source community, brought a whole set of new requirements and challenges for the Eclipse platform, such as dynamic plug-in management, services, security, and improved performance. This paper describes the path from the proprietary Eclipse 2.1 runtime to the new Eclipse 3.0 runtime based on OSGiTM specifications. It details the motivation for such a change and discusses the challenges this change presented.