<p>ECF is a framework for supporting the development of distributed Eclipse-based tools and
applications. It can be used to create other plugins, tools, or full Eclipse <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/rcp">RCP applications</a>
that require asynchronous point-to-point or publish-and-subscribe messaging.</p>
<p>ECF also provides an open distributed component model based upon the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/">Equinox runtime</a>, along with a growing set of extensible communications components.  All APIs, components, and ECF protocol providers may be reused, extended, or replaced by developers.</p>
<p>To test and demonstrate the framework, the committers and other community members have built applications with features such as user presence and instant messaging, multi-user chat, file sharing, co-browsing, shared drawing/whiteboard, and real-time collaborative editing.  See <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Eclipse_Communication_Framework_Project">plans and subprojects</a> for efforts currently underway.</p>