In what probably marks the start of the largest deployment of Eclipse technology ever, Lotus Notes 8 recently went into public beta. There’s a pretty good article out there on developerWorks that gives you an overview of how the client was built on top of Eclipse.
The big news in Lotus Notes V8 is that the Notes V8 client encapsulates all the code that is Lotus Notes within the Eclipse environment. This move puts Lotus Notes on an open-source Java-based platform. Originally created as an integrated application development environment, its open, plug-in-based architecture has made Eclipse itself the foundation for rich client platform development. Lotus Notes V8 is built on Lotus Expeditor, IBM’s universal managed-client software, which, in turn, is built on Eclipse.
In the end, this is great news for Eclipse which now gets to interact with a whole new set of users and developers.
Eclipse (OSGi) on clients… devices… servers… , what’s next?