Since then, use of Eclipse has spread among corporate developers working with both the publicly available Eclipse source code as well as packaged tools based on the technology from vendors such as IBM, BEA Systems Inc. and Borland Software Corp.

Framingham, Mass.-based research firm IDC estimates that more than 20 percent of software developers worldwide work in organizations that make significant use of Eclipse. The IDE has been managed by the nonprofit Eclipse Foundation since early 2004.

"Compared to other commercial products, Eclipse is much better in quality and features," said Barry Strasnick, CIO at CitiStreet LLC, a Quincy, Mass.-based benefits provider. "There is very little reason to spend money on commercial IDEs anymore. We have not enforced [Eclipse's] use for all developers, but it has become the de facto standard."

Based on surveys of CitiStreet developers, Strasnick said that Eclipse makes software development more efficient because it reports errors as soon as code is typed and because it can organize Java code without requiring that it be manually changed.

"The quality of the Java code produced using Eclipse is much better than code produced using other tools," Strasnick said. "Nowadays, most developers [at CitiStreet] wouldn't think of developing even small Java programs without using Eclipse. It just does not make sense to do it the hard way."