the eclipse project is an open source software development project dedicated to providing a robust, full featured, commercial quality, industry platform for the development of highly integrated tools. eclipse ide is an extensible java ide for development of highly integrated tools. is there a better alternative? no, there are many ide programs out there such as webstorm ide, but no ide truly has as many plugins available and supports as many languages as eclipse.
this gives you full cross platform use thanks to the cloud feature of eclipse. Eclipse can be installed on windows computers, mac cocoa, and linux systems. eclipse equinox is an implementation of the osgi core framework specification. eclipse jetty provides a web server and rvlet container. Eclipse glassfish provides a complete application server which serves as a compatible implementation for the jakarta ee specification.