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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T20:40:47+00:00

I’m just starting with OSGi and Eclipse RCP. Could someone explain to me the

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I’m just starting with OSGi and Eclipse RCP.
Could someone explain to me the difference between “Eclipse” and “Equinox” as the target platform, when creating a new eclipse plugin project?
I still know that Equinox is Eclipse’s implementation of OSGi.
I read in some articles that eclipse rcp is also based on Equinox. So where is the difference between the target platform you have to choose in a new Eclipse Plugin Project?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It is about the environement in which the module you will be creating will run: see this

    Eclipse Equinox is the runtime environment on which the Eclipse IDE and Eclipse RCP application are based.
    In Eclipse the smallest unit of modularization is a plugin. The terms plugin and bundle are (almost) interchangable. An Eclipse plugin is also an OSGi bundle and vice versa.

    alt text

    • bundle for OSGi, able to run in the Equinox framework (within or outside of Eclipse)
    • plugin for Eclipse, to run within an Eclipse-based application.

    See Equinox Quick Start Guide:

    The Equinox OSGi framework implementation forms the underpinnings of the Eclipse RCP and IDE platforms but it is in fact a fully standalone OSGi implementation.

    You can run a bundle independently from Eclipse:

    java -jar org.eclipse.osgi_3.2.0.jar -console

    Once this is running you will see an osgi> prompt. This is the OSGi console waiting for you to type commands

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