# Introduction to PDE

The Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) is a tool that is designed to assist developers in the creation, development, testing, debugging, and deployment of Eclipse plug-ins. The mandate of PDE also encompasses tooling for the development of fragments, features, and update sites.

PDE is part of the Eclipse SDK and not a separately launched tool. In line with the general Eclipse platform philosophy, PDE provides a wide variety of platform contributions (e.g. views, editors, wizards, launchers, etc.) that blend transparently with the rest of the Eclipse workbench, and assist the developer in every stage of plug-in development while working inside the Eclipse workbench.

As a pre-requisite to working with PDE, you need to understand the concepts presented in the Platform ISV Guide and the JDT User Guide.