Eclipse is an extensible Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that can be customised to fit almost any IT development role. CourseComposer™ is an example of an Eclipse application which has been built specifically to develop courseware for CourseManager™.

Although the Eclipse Platform has a lot of built-in functionality, most of that functionality is very generic. It takes additional tools to extend the Platform to work with new content types, to do new things with existing content types, and to focus the generic functionality on something specific.

The Eclipse Platform is built on a mechanism for discovering, integrating, and running modules called plug-ins. A tool provider (such as Myrnham Associates) writes a tool as a separate plug-in that operates on files in the workspace and surfaces its tool-specific User Interface in the workbench. When the Platform is launched, the user is presented with an integrated development environment (IDE) composed of the set of available plug-ins.

One such plug-in is the Eclipse Help System - see Figure 1, “Eclipse Client Help”.

Figure 1. Eclipse Client Help

The Eclipse Help System plug-in is built around the Tomcat Web Services application server and, when run in a server environment, becomes an InfoCenter.

Figure 2. Eclipse InfoCenter

An Eclipse InfoCenter can accessed by any Web Browser and presents information in exactly the same format as the native Eclipse Help system - Figure 2, “Eclipse InfoCenter”

A minimal Eclipse Platform installation configured to run as an InfoCenter can be a very useful way to publish a number of documents in a structured environment offering:

Myrnham Associates recommend the use of the Linux platform for running an InfoCenter and have experience of rolling out such systems on corporate Intranets. Support for Eclipse InfoCenter is built directly into CourseManager™. Our Sales team will be happy to discuss methods of leveraging CourseComposer™ and CourseManager™ with this technology.