Designer is based on Eclipse technology. This open source technology is actively supported by over 60 leading companies (such as IBM*, HP*, Intel*, SAP, Fujitsu*, and Oracle) and by thousands of other developers throughout the commercial industry and the academic world.
With Designer based on Eclipse, you receive the following benefits:
Published, well-documented, and supported APIs used heavily across the industry.
An underlying model that integrates well with any plug-in.
A rich, advanced UI.
Capability to fully and easily extend our product in the future.
Better integration and leveraging of other applications.
Open source as the basic framework.
You can install Novell tools into any Eclipse-based framework.
Out-of-box tools (Java* editor, debugger, JUnit, ANT, CVS integration) that are free if you want to access them (and other tools) within the Designer.
Cross-platform benefits of Java, but native performance and native look of the platform.
Quick access to meaningful tools.
A framework that will quickly pick up entirely new capabilities contributed by a larger community.
Instead of focusing on tools, developers are able to concentrate on providing quality content and not spend so much time on the plumbing, debugging, and fixing of the framework.