Coding for the Future: The IDE (R)evolution for the Next Generation

Coding for the future
Director of netbeans engineering

The road to here:

• Ide wars in the 2000s
• Soon two horse race with netbeans and eclipse
• Most moved to build eclipse plugins.
• Intellij commercial
• Then an evolution occurred that took project data from ide and stored them in ant maven, hudson,etc. Devs can now use ide of source on shared project.

Recent trends:

• Polyglot world, outside java. 
• Code completion, debugger, etc.
• JavaScript big player, difficult to tool.

Is java tooling mature:

• Debugger, compiler, error handling, etc now popularly available.
• Mostly enhancement requests now.
• Wysiwyg where possible.

Web ide

• Code editor in browser
• Orion is e.g.
• Combination of editor and cloud platform
• Mostly for web client technologies. Easy to tool to run in browser.
• Feature set in web ide lower and so is expectation's.
• How to integrate with back end.
• Lose performance compared to standalone ide.
• Offline mode a problem.
• Not a replacement.

Opportunities for growth:

• Interacting with managed systems, clouds.
• Much different than deploying war to local server.
• Amazon, google, mbaas.
• Hard to emulate on local machine.
• Really only write custom code, rest provided.
• Will always need it people which is a wall.
• Tools don't allow for easy debugging

• Combination with developer services
• CI + code analysis + git
• Rule based propagation
• CI + indexing with maven a problem. Stop indexing libraries.
• Run code analysis on git repo. Should have find refs etc. Warnings on stable code etc.

• Configuration Management
• Setting up dev env locally.
• Painful
• Changing projects can become expensive.
• Encapsulate dev and execution envs. One click setup.
• What to use for encapsulation? 
• VMs? Gets expensive for multiple users. Local ide with remote source can be problem in some ides.
• Containers on hosted cloud service. Is it the same env?security. Local ide remote source problem.
• Containers not really isolated
• Locally downloaded containers. Same source problem.
• Container density limited if using big systems like weblogic
• Docker improving.

Who is well positioned to deliver?

• Difficult to charge for browser based ide.
• Primary value is cloud integration.
• Have own cloud or partner with one.
• Amazon and google integrating their own small infrastructures.

Netbeans pitch

• Split ui from logic
• Run in multi tenant server
• Core libs as services.
• Oracle dev cloud service
• Tailwind code editor
• Various cloud services