Since Eclipse was first released in November 2001, its user interface has remained mostly static. Each window has a perspective, which contains zero or one editor area, and zero or more view parts. In early releases, every perspective had exactly one editor area, and it was not until the release of Eclipse RCP with Eclipse 3.0 in 2004 that it was possible to disable the editor, and have a custom application suitable for a non-IDE use.
However, the presentation of the perspective always proved difficult to customize, such as changing the background color or arrangement of the windows or toolbars.
The Eclipse 4 model provides a way to model an application both at design time, and also interpret and modify it at runtime. An application has a top-level model, but may also have additional model fragments contributed by different bundles. Additionally, the separate rendering framework allows the UI to be represented with different tools such as JavaFX and HTML. In...