Eclipse grew out of technology and concepts at IBM. Prior to being announced as an open source project in 2001, it already had several years of development and evolution under its belt. Since then, thousands of developers have contributed and continue to contribute to the project. This means that many of the core concepts and implementations of Eclipse are quite mature. Moreover, the project was put into the hands of a newly formed not-for-profit foundation in 2004. In other words, Eclipse is here to stay and is unlikely to disappear overnight like some software projects.
Another advantage of using Eclipse is that it has found wide acceptance. No matter whether you are doing development in PHP, Java, Perl, or C++, there is a community of users and developers ready to lend a hand if you need support. As we will see shortly, efforts to make Eclipse a strong tool for PHP development are backed and driven by Zend—probably the biggest commercial name in PHP.
Eclipse is not so much...