Eclipse is many things but the core of Eclipse is an extremely powerful runtime platform that has mechanisms for discovering, integrating, running, and updating modules called plugins.

Installed Eclipse plugins operate on regular files in an area of the local file system called the workspace.

JLense is built on top of this core functionality.

The JLense UIWorks plugin is basically a port of Eclipse's UI plugin and JFace toolkit to work on top of Swing, instead of on top of IBM's SWT widget toolkit. Support for IDE-specific functionality (like Editors) was dropped during the port.

The focus of the JLense-UIWorks plugin is to develop a UI framework for developing business applications, not development tools.

The focus of the JLense project in general is to develop new plugins for developing business applications, not development tools. For instance, a plugin that provides reporting functionality, or a plugin that provides access to corporate business objects.

We hope that you find the JLense framework a compelling alternative to Eclipse for developing business applications but we acknowledge our debt to the Eclipse project as our source of inspiration, great ideas, as well as the original source of some of our code and documentation!