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Uniquely, Eclipse employs plug-ins in order to provide all of its functionality unlike other IDEs where functionality is often hard-wired. This plug-in mechanism allows Eclipse to support other languages in addition to Java. For example, a plugin exists that adds support for C/C++ to eclipse. Other plugins exist that add everything from telnet to database support.
Eclipse's widgets are based on IBM's third generation widget toolkit for Java called SWT which improves on Sun's first and second generation toolkits (AWT and Swing, respectively). Eclipse's user interface also depends on an intermediate GUI layer called JFace which simplifies the construction of applications based on SWT.
Eclipse R3 (2003) selected the OSGi Service Platform specifications as the runtime architecture.
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