Integration Watch: A sudden bumper crop of IDEs

By Andrew Binstock

December 8, 2008 —

I have intermittently discussed IDEs in this column, as they are among my favorite areas of technology. Not so long ago, I opined that the world of IDEs was likely to see more consolidation, largely as a result of the availability of good open-source IDEs and the reluctance of companies to continue developing their own products when they could simply adopt an alternative. That alternative in many cases was Eclipse; we have seen its adoption by a number of companies that formerly used their own IDE frameworks.

For example, JBuilder, a Java IDE designed by Borland and now owned by Embarcadero Technologies, migrated to Eclipse. The new product was excellent but did not do well commercially. BEA (now part of Oracle) and other vendors also moved to Eclipse, turning out good products that did not find wide adoption.

So Eclipse has not overturned the world of IDEs. In fact, several years on, most of the major IDEs are still standing, and new entrants have joined the fray.

The newest addition is RubyMine, a Ruby environment from JetBrains, the same outfit that puts out the brilliant IntelliJ IDEA Java environment. The product is still in public preview and can be downloaded for free. It supports both Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It has all the standard features of a language IDE (such as syntax highlighting, code completion and project navigation), plus on-the-fly code analysis with refactoring; unit testing with RSpec and Test::Unit; a full debugger with Rails support; and Rake integration. It looks very promising. It will not remain free; the production version, like the company’s other products, will be sold on a per-developer basis. But users of IntelliJ IDEA often state that its superiority to open-source IDEs makes it well worth the cost. I have little doubt that RubyMine will meet the same high standard.

Among open-source IDEs, the best Ruby support is currently found in NetBeans. That product will have moved to version 6.5 by the time this column appears. The release adds support for Groovy, Grails and PHP, and it contains enhanced support for JavaScript. NetBeans is an extensive environment that’s easy to use and lacks the heavy feel of Eclipse.

Oracle JDeveloper 11, meanwhile, shipped in October. JDeveloper is free but not open source. The tool is increasingly a strategic asset for Oracle: It’s used for many things outside of pure development, such as orchestrating Web services in BPEL and modeling business processes à la BPM. Predictably, it is oriented toward enterprise development.

The new version bundles a developer edition of WebLogic and greatly expands what can be done with Java Server Faces. Oracle, which is a big proponent of JSF, has bundled many more JSF components so that developers can create rich AJAX-style interfaces to apps without leaving Java. (Google Web Toolkit does something similar. In both cases, the JavaScript portion is handled behind the scenes.) The new JSF capabilities even include mashups.

Oracle has also extended its Application Development Framework (now part of the Apache Trinidad project) with an abstraction layer for SQL. The new language enables a more expressive statement of what is to be done; that statement is then translated into optimized DBMS-specific SQL. This is cool stuff.

During this same period, ActiveState released Komodo 5.0. This IDE is a favorite of Perl, Python and Tcl developers, and indeed, users of those languages have no better editor than Komodo. The product knows and supports their principal platforms, such as Django and Zope, as well as handling most other tasks with aplomb. Version 5.0 adds more-extensive version control system support, better layout (especially on Mac OS X) and greater speed.

Komodo is a for-pay product, but an open-source version called Komodo Edit is available. Version 5 of the Komodo Edit, which consists primarily of the editor and project-manager portions of the commercial product, was released simultaneously.

Finally, rev 8.0 of JetBrains’ IntelliJ environment is about to be released. This version improves speed and adds debuggers for Flex and JavaScript, support for Scala, and enhanced support for Groovy. For Java users, it brings support for many packages: Google Web Toolkit 1.5, JBoss Seam, Spring 2.5 and Struts 2. JetBrains’ rapid response in adding support for emerging standards and languages is a cornerstone of IntelliJ’s appeal.

The world of IDEs is by no means collapsing in on itself. Rather, it is expanding in new directions and continuing an aggressive schedule of product upgrades. Ain’t life grand?

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.

Related Search Term(s): Eclipse, IDEs, Java, open source, Ruby, ActiveState, JetBrains, Oracle

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33098

In tough financial times, open source got more than a look It was a year of infrastructure, it was a year of enhanced development tools. But most of all, it was the year in which repositories grew up and mobile phones opened up.

Oracle's WebLogic now available for grid-hosted apps A slew of announcements from Oracle also include updated versions of the JDeveloper IDE, the Oracle Application Development Framework, TopLink and a pair of integration packs. EclipseLink will be supported by Oracle as well.

Tomcat, Eclipse named the most popular in SDTimes study When it comes to popularity in commercial Java servers, IBM and Oracle were more favored than Sun.

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