The power of plugins! (Score 1)

The day of the Uber IDE is upon us. The big players in this new framework market are obviously VS .Net and the excellent Eclipse framework & the extenibility of these (Eclipse in particular) makes them perfect for the potential toolset maker. They are quickly becoming ubiquitious in the industry. Developers are much more likely to use a tool that seamlessly integrates with a platform they are already familiar and productive with. They are rich in functionality that would be hard and expensive to duplicate in a roll your own situation. Much more time and development energy could be spent on the actual tools rather on the UI and other necessary periphery required as much of that is already present and easily utilized. A case in point is RIMs Develeopent Environment for J2ME. THey have developed their own IDE for writing applications for their J2ME offerring that no developer in their right mind would want to use (slow and not too pretty!). Their time would have been much better spent in making tools that plug nicely into something that resembles an enterprise IDE, rather than waste their enrgies on unnecessary wheel reinvention and poorly at that!