## Introduction

The Eclipse ESCET application framework provides common functionality for applications within the Eclipse ESCET toolkit. It has several goals:

- Provide a uniform end-user experience, for example in the form of uniform option dialogs.

- Hide technical details from the end user, for example in the form of crash reports and user friendly error messages, instead of stack traces.

- Provide support for applications to run both as a stand-alone Java program (say, from the command line), as well as within the Eclipse environment.

- Provide the basic functionality needed by most applications, to reduce the overhead needed for developers to develop an application.

The documentation for this framework describes the issues that the application framework attempts to solve, and the way it solves them. It also provides guidance in implementing applications using the application framework.