Where can I find information about the Eclipse Architecture Standard?

I basically need the full description of开发者_运维百科 the standard as well as any document that touches the subject

(its applicability, problems, quality attributes promoted and not promoted by the standard).

Any reference will help.

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Perhaps Erich Gamma's book Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins is what you're looking for?

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Notes on the Eclipse Plug-in Architecture ?

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The Book - OSGi in Practice from Neil BARTLETT is also a good addition to the framework used by Eclipse: OSGi.
(So while it is not directly about the eclipse architecture, it is about one of its core element)

Extract from section 1.8.2:

As already noted, the Eclipse IDE and platform are based on an implementation of OSGi. However this was not always the case: prior to version 3.0, Eclipse used its own custom module system.

In Eclipse terminology, a module is a “plug-in”.
In fact, Eclipse developers often still use the term plug-in as an alternative name for an OSGi bundle.
In the old Eclipse system, a plug-in was a directory containing a file at the top level named plugin.xml. This file contained metadata that was broadly similar to the metadata in an OSGi manifest: the name of the plug-in, vendor, version, exported packages and required plug-ins.

Notice a key difference here.
In the Eclipse plug-in system, dependencies were not declared at the level of Java packages but of whole plug-ins. We would declare a dependency on a plug-in based on its ID, and this would give us access to all of the exported packages in that plug-in.