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I repeat, the minimal core of Eclipse is a "server" (quoted because I believe you can argue that it isn't really a server) that dynamically manages modules. You can strip it down to nothing but the help server and the help if you want. Or at least, I managed to do that back in 2006. So if that's what you mean by needing the Eclipse framework, then no problem. The stripped down version was no heavier than the average HAT output (with it's loads and loads of javascript, purposely convoluted to obfuscate the actual implementations).
But even more fundamentally, the point is that to have true and proper role-based help, you probably want to implement a doc server that works out the role logic before passing the content to the client. And implementing a specialized doc server for a product family is in keeping with current trends.
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Eclipse started out as a Jave integrated development environment based
on the VisualAge SmallTalk IDE but has evolved into a family of
platforms including Java and Web application frameworks.
I spent a lot of time working with Eclipse since a former employer was
migrating from Visual C++ to Eclipse frameworks and I had to port the
help. The help system has a lot of interesting features but I think
they all depend on using an Eclipse framework.
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