In this section we give you a cook's tour of Eclipse. We will use patterns as analytical tools to tell you compact Eclipse design stories. This will be an orthogonal view to the other circles we have traveled so far. Our goal is to give you some additional insights into Eclipse components. Once you understand the Eclipse design, you will learn more quickly how to play according to Eclipse's rules.

We assume that you know about design patterns^[1] and don't have to rush to the bookshelf when you hear about Composite. You will learn some pattern variations in the discussion that follows. Patterns need to be tweaked and adapted to a particular context.

We will cover the design insight in different components. The following diagram shows pattern-story coverage of the Eclipse architecture. We have tried to cover these components in ways you will likely encounter when contributing to Eclipse.

The pattern stories cover the Eclipse components from the bottom-up. We start with the Core Runtime (org.eclipse.core.runtime) component.