Top 10 reasons to use eclipse…

1. Eclipse is Free: I have seen very few organizations that would support you with expensive IDEs. As a developer if i need to play with, i dont have too many choices. Eclipse is free. I can download without too many hassles. Of course there are some other (i dont want to mention the names) IDEs for free too. But they don’t score in some other aspects. I get so many features for free.
2. Eclipse Community & Industry Support: When i want to explain my boss and customers about eclipse, it important to know who is behind this project. Till now i had very few arguments about the credibility of the project and the people behind it. Especially the way it got spread through out the developer community from USA, Europe, and Asia is great. Developers celebrated eclipse’s birthday in Hyderabad, India in a huge way (doesn’t it say …).
3. API Documentation: As a developer and technical lead, every one is interested to have a good API documentation so that the learning cycle is less. You don’t spend too much time in digging into unclear documentation. However good is the software, i want to have a good API documentation and eclipse has it.
4. Free plugins: Once i have the base platform, i would want to use supporting and new features. And yes, many of VERY useful features are free. I have used so many plugins like findbugs, checkstyle, subclipse, etc… but in the end for IT departments its so nice to have something free and USEFUL.
5. Code Samples: Sometimes i better understand with the help of code rather than reading some documentation. Eclipse has great code samples for all top level projects. Whoever starts SWT, JFace would definitely get lots of samples form snippets and also from the articles. Thanks to the guys who have supported all these.
6. Design Philosophy: Many colleagues and subordinates have learned good design practices and programming patterns from eclipse code. Thanks to the book written by Gamma and Beck. Clean plugin architecture and clean interfaces.
7. Customization : With the base platform around, you can do whatever you want to do. Users have the every possibility to customize their plugins that way they want.
8. Extensibility : How else would we have seen the Java IDE, C++ IDE, Cobol IDE, PHP IDE, RCP Applications, etc…
9. Productization: Its so easy to do productization. Changing the icons, splash screens, custom messages etc… Seeing some applications, you would not even recognize that they are built out of eclipse.
10. Cross-Platform: A recent plugin i developed for a RIA/Web2.0 client, works on Windows, Linux and MacOSX; with the same code base and a single build. This is so much of a relief for many of the organizations who wants to develop the applications for multiple platforms.