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Recently, a few people have come to me ask how Eclipse maintains its API and versions. The intent of this question was to see what lessons there are to be learned for other OSGi-based applications. If we step back a bit, in essence, Eclipse is a large OSG application. On top of that, Eclipse is a platform where people build their own OSGi applications on… it’s an OSGi party. As a result, there are many people dependent on the API Eclipse produces so the management of this API is important. If breaking API changes were common, people would have less desire to build on the platform. To help with this problem, Eclipse developed PDE API Tools. I’ll discuss four main areas around API management that API Tools can help you with.