Eclipse is a free software/open source platform-independent software framework for delivering what the project calls "rich-client application”. So far this framework has typically been used to develop IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). Eclipse employs plugins in order to provide all of its functionality on top of the rich client platform, in contrast to some other IDEs where functionality is typically hard-coded.
In this sense, we have developed a set of tools to embed the Maude system into the Eclipse environment. These tools, which we call Maude Development Tools, comprise two plugins. The first one (Maude Daemon) encapsulates a Maude process into a set of Java classes. It provides two APIs to control the Maude process in batch or interactive mode. It also configures the Maude process according to the user preferences.
The second plugin, called Maude Simple GUI, is a simple IDE to develop Maude programs. This plugin is composed by a text editor with syntax highlight, the Maude console view to control the Maude process execution, and some other wizards and popup menus.