Components of IDE for Android

Most people know Eclipse as an integrated development environment (IDE) for Java. Today it is the leading development environment for Java with a market share of approximately 65%.

Eclipse is created by an Open Source community and is used in several different areas, e.g. as a development environment for Java or Android applications. Eclipse's roots go back to 2001.

The Eclipse Open Source community has over 200 Open Source projects covering different aspects of software development.

The Eclipse projects are governed by the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse Foundation is a non-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse Open Source projects and helps to cultivate both an Open Source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services.

The Eclipse IDE can be extended with additional software components. Eclipse calls these software components plug-ins. Several Open Source projects and companies have extended the Eclipse IDE.


Eclipse provides Perspectives, Views and Editors. Views and Editors are grouped into Perspectives.

The workspace is the physical location (file path) you are working in. Your projects, source files, images and other artifacts can be stored and saved in your workspace but you can also refer to external resources, e.g. projects, in your workspace.


Parts are user interface components which allow you to navigate and modify data. Parts are typically divided into Views and Editors.


A Perspective is a visual container for a set of Parts. The Eclipse IDE uses Perspectives to arrange Parts for different development tasks.

You can change the layout and content within a Perspective by opening or closing Parts and by re-arranging them.

The default Perspective for Java development can be opened via Window → Open Perspective → Java.

On the left hand side, this perspective shows the "Package Explorer" View, which allows to browse your Java projects and to select the components you want to work on via double-click.

For example to open a Java source file, open the tree under src, select the corresponding .java file and double-click it. This will open the file in an Editor.