The Eclipse Platform is an open extensible IDE for anything and yet nothing in particular. The Eclipse Platform provides building blocks and a foundation for constructing and running integrated software-development tools. The Eclipse Platform allows tool builders to independently develop tools that integrate with other people's tools so seamlessly you can't tell where one tool ends and another starts.

The Eclipse SDK (software developer kit) is the consolidation of the components produced by the three Eclipse Project subprojects (Platform, JDT - Java development tools, and PDE - Plug-in development environment) into a single download.

Together these pieces provide a feature-rich development environment that allows the developer to efficiently create tools that integrate seamlessly into the Eclipse Platform.

The 1.0 Release build of the Eclipse Platform was designed to run on Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows ME and Red Hat Linux Version 7.1 (x86/Motif).

The most recent 2.0 builds of the Eclipse Platform are designed to run on Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows ME, Red Hat Linux Version 7.1 (x86/Motif and x86/GTK)), SuSE Linux 7.1 (x86/Motif and x86/GTK) and Solaris 8 (SPARC/Motif).