Market dynamics: the IDE market.

Interactive Development Environments

The interactive development environment was one of many new types of application made possible by graphical user interfaces. Compiler vendors hastened to add programmer-friendly features like source code browsers and debuggers to their own toolsets, leading to popular IDEs like Microsoft Visual Studio and Borland Delphi. IDEs turned out to be especially useful for creating presentation-layer code, as most developers prefer "dragging and dropping" icons and other visual controls to writing page after page of program statements.

A basic IDE consists of a code editor, some kind of project library, a debugger, and a build system comprising a compiler and (perhaps) deployment facilities. However, more sophisticated IDEs draw together many other categories of tools, from version control systems, to test harnesses, and documentation libraries.

Meanwhile, the idea of "pluggability" has led to some IDEs becoming launching pads for virtually all the applications a developer needs. This means that a particular IDE's desirability depends partly on the selection of third-party products available as plug-ins. For instance, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD), as well as the open source Eclipse IDE, benefit from being the only IDEs tightly integrated with Rational's XDE modeling tool. Instead of creating UML designs in a separate modeling workbench, developers can do everything from within their favorite IDE.

In a practical sense, it is meaningless to talk about "the IDE market" as an undifferentiated whole. Products compete with one another only to the extent that they are more or less interchangeable. But most of today's leading IDEs are target-specific: they can be used to develop applications for only one deployment platform. Thus Microsoft Visual Studio is limited to developing for Windows, while Borland's JBuilder and IBM's WebSphere Studio Application Developer are strictly Java tools.

Another important trend has been the growing popularity of open source IDEs and "IDE toolkits"--software frameworks that provide all the necessary components for building or tailoring custom IDEs. At present there are two outstanding examples of this category: Eclipse (originally sponsored by IBM) and NetBeans (originally sponsored by Sun). Although Eclipse and NetBeans are both written in Java, they have been extended to support development in different languages and on multiple platforms.

The IDE market can be subdivided into four main sectors:

1. Products that target Windows only

2. Open source IDEs and IDE toolkits

3. Products that support Java only

4. Others

IDEs That Support Development for Windows

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

Visual Studio .NET is one of the most ambitious projects that Microsoft has ever undertaken. As the only complete development environment for the .NET Framework, it bears a huge load of responsibility. Microsoft stands or falls by its success in cultivating the developer community. If a wide range of useful, affordable applications are written for a platform, that platform will thrive--otherwise not.

Visual Studio .NET has to accomplish two fundamentally different things which are not easily reconciled. It has to provide comprehensive support for Web services and the rest of the new .NET functionality. Meanwhile, it has to deliver an upward compatible migration path for developers who just want to carry on coding standalone and client/server applications.

The .NET Framework consists of the Common Language Environment (CLR) and a huge set of base and special-purpose classes. The CLR is a runtime environment that allows code generated by any .NET compiler to run on any .NET platform. A .NET compiler is one that adheres to the Common Type System (CTS) including the Common Language Specification (CLS), and generates Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL)--a hardware-independent instruction set that is translated to machine code by a "just-in-time" (JIT) compiler before execution.

Managed code and data are written to take advantage of these CLR services; this requires the provision of metadata by the compiler. Unmanaged code does not have to provide this information, and can run slightly faster. All code written before .NET was unmanaged.

As well as the four languages shipped with Visual Studio .NET--Visual Basic.NET, Visual C++.NET, Visual C#.NET and Visual JScript.NET, over 20 third-party offerings have been committed, some of which are already available. These include Cobol, Eiffel, Perl, Python and Smalltalk.

Components written for COM and COM+ can call and be called by the .NET Framework, preserving users' investment in this "internal legacy". COM+ code can take advantage of automatic component services such as transactions, object pooling, queued components and events.

Throughout Visual Studio .NET, RAD techniques are used to simplify complex tasks using visual tools like the Windows Forms Designer and the Web Forms Designer. Programmers drag and drop controls on to a form, add business logic written in the language of their choice, and click a button to execute and debug the application.

Visual Studio .NET extends the RAD approach to the creation, testing, and deployment of server-based solutions. Developers can drag and drop server components such as message queues, remote servers and Windows services onto a design surface--then add code, in any language, to connect the applications. One of Visual Studio .NET's greatest strengths is the speed with which Web services can be built. In principle, all that is needed is to add a single line to a class or method definition, which then becomes available as a Web service.

While ASP.NET speeds the creation of Web services and conventional Web applications, ADO.NET hides most of the complexity associated with back-end data sources. Visual Studio .NET's Database Designer lets database developers browse their schemas graphically and add, modify, or remove objects such as tables, columns, indexes, views and stored procedures.

Borland C# Builder for the Microsoft .NET Framework

Borland Software has specialized in providing fast, efficient programming tools since it was founded by Philippe Kahn in 1983. Today it still has a good reputation with the Windows, Java and Linux developer communities, and claims an installed base of 3 million developers.

Its relationship with Microsoft remains ambivalent. The two companies have been inveterate rivals for over a decade, a rivalry that nearly led to Borland's extinction. Today Microsoft may even find it advantageous to have a highly visible competitor that is never likely to become a serious threat.

Therefore it was not surprising when Borland became the first company to license to .NET Framework, leading to the release in May of C# Builder for the Microsoft .NET Framework (previously codenamed Sidewinder). As well as offering an alternative to Microsoft's implementation of the C# language, C# Builder follows the pattern of Borland C++ Builder and JBuilder IDEs. It also provides close integration with the Together modeling workbench, and optimized access to RDBMS such as IBM DB2 and Oracle 9i as well as Microsoft SQL Server.

More controversially, C# Builder includes Borland's Janeva, a brand-new integration tool that links .NET clients and servers to J2EE and Corba servers using Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP). This flies in the face of the received wisdom, handed down by Microsoft and others, which maintains that interoperability is best done using Web services.

Since a lot of enterprises use both J2EE and .NET, it will be interesting to see how many choose Borland as a supplier that can deliver fast, efficient interoperability between the two platforms. Borland has already integrated several of its lifecycle tools with .NET:

* CaliberRM (requirements management)

* Together ControlCenter (modeling)

* OptimizeIt (performance profiling)

* StarTeam SDK (version control)

* InterBase (RDBMS)

Borland Delphi Studio

From its launch in 1995, Delphi was hailed as well designed, powerful, and easy to use. In its first 18 months Borland shipped over 600,000 copies of Delphi worldwide, and the Pascal-based "RAD IDE" has sold consistently ever since. It offers an extremely attractive combination of fast, easy development, objectorientation, component reuse and runtime efficiency.

Delphi 7 Studio, which has been shipping since August, provides a measure of integration with .NET through the Visual Component Library (VCL) for .NET. Although the current version is a Win32 development environment, it includes a pre-release copy of Delphi for .NET.

Having added UML modeling through "Bold for Delphi", Borland also claims that Delphi now implements OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA), as well as visual modeling and re-factoring. Like Borland's other development tools, Delphi Studio supports Corba.

Web services can easily be created with Borland's BizSnap, while conventional Web application development is also streamlined. Microsoft's Global XML Web Services Architecture (GXA) is fully supported--quite unusual even today. And to facilitate porting to and from Linux, a copy of Kylix (Delphi language edition) is included with Delphi Studio.

Borland C++ Builder Studio

Borland has long been known for the excellence of its C++ compilers and tools, and C++ Builder will be the choice of many developers. Unlike Visual Studio .NET, it implements ANSI/ISO standard C++. Although .NET is not supported, COM+, ActiveX, and automation objects are.

While it might be thought that ANSI/ISO standard C++ is no longer of much interest with the arrival of .NET, nothing could be further from the truth. Confronted with .NET, C++ programmers must choose between managed and unmanaged code. If they choose managed code, they might just as well migrate to C#. And if they prefer conventional, unmanaged code, they may choose not to adopt .NET just yet.

As with Delphi, a copy of Kylix is included for Linux portability, as well as the VCL and the Component Library for Cross-Platform (CLX). C++ Builder comes with over 165 reusable components visual, database and network programming.

As with Delphi, BizSnap and WebSnap simplify Web services and Web application development, and DataSnap offers easy-to-use database access middleware. As usual, Corba is supported too.

Open Source IDEs and IDE Toolkits

There are only two open source IDE toolkits with global visibility--NetBeans and Eclipse. Both are sponsored by large computer manufacturers.

NetBeans

NetBeans was a Czech start-up founded in 1997 by Roman Stanek. Its big idea was to write an IDE in pure Java, thus making it portable to almost any platform. Sun bought NetBeans in October 1999, and offered it as open source in June 2002, since which time a sizable community has grown up. Stanek went on to launch Systinet, whose WASP is one of the best Web services development tools on the market today.

NetBeans offers two distinct products: the NetBeans IDE and the NetBeans Platform.

* The NetBeans IDE consists of the Platform plus additional modules, such as an editor, a debugger, build control tools, version control and other development facilities. Visual design tools, wizards and automatic code generation are built in, as well as support for JSP, HTML, XML, RMI, Corba, JINI, JDBC and servlets. The current programming language repertoire includes C, C++ and Java. Drivers are supplied for most of the leading RDBMS, including IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, mySQL and PostgreSQL. Thanks to advanced features like refactoring and user-configurable code templates, NetBeans advocates maintain that it is comparable with leading proprietary IDEs such as Borland JBuilder--with the advantages of full access to the source code and zero license cost.

* The NetBeans Platform provides the underlying services required for most large desktop applications--window management, menus, setting management and storage, file access and the like. Since the Platform is written in pure Java, it will run unchanged on a wide range of operating systems.

Today NetBeans has rather more than 30 third-party plug-ins. While impressive, this represents about one tenth of the corresponding figure for Eclipse. In 2002, the project recorded 370,000 downloads of the IDE and 25,500 of the NetBeans Platform, indicating widespread usage even if a proportion of those downloading the software are merely "tire-kickers".

Novell and Sun are among the most prominent companies to have reused NetBeans as part of their own products, and Compuware's OptimalJ, which is one of the best-known Model Driven Architecture (MDA) toolsets, includes the NetBeans IDE as a way for developers to add to the generated source code.

Eclipse

Demonstrating yet again that the first-comer does not always win in the long run, IBM announced Eclipse in November 2001--a year and a half after Sun had open-sourced NetBeans. Yet the response to IBM's initiative was far greater, and today Eclipse easily dominates NetBeans. For instance, Eclipse.org claimed 2.5 million downloads in its first year, seven times NetBeans' run-rate.

The Eclipse.org board resounds with well-known names--Borland, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Merant, OMG, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, SuSE, Sybase... In an unusual move for a standards consortium, the Object Management Group (OMG) joined Eclipse.org last December. Soon after, plans for UML plug-ins were announced.

Industry watchers were quick to notice the symbolism of the name "Eclipse", suggesting that IBM's real motive was to put Sun in the shade. Sun was certainly upset that IBM seemed to be going head to head with NetBeans. This was all moonshine, however, as the name "Eclipse" actually refers to the last track on Pink Floyd's celebrated album "Dark Side Of The Moon".

Like NetBeans, Eclipse began life as a proprietary product. It was the work of Object Technology International (OTI), a small Canadian company acquired by IBM in 1996 but allowed to go on working nearly independently. OTI has an extremely high reputation in the object-oriented community, and it was here that IBM's VisualAge family of development tools originated.

Realizing in 1998-9 that VisualAge for Java was showing its age, IBM and OTI began work on a nextgeneration Java IDE based initially on VisualAge Micro Edition, which was already implemented in pure Java. The idea was to create a highly extensible Java IDE capable of competing with Microsoft Visual Studio. Among other things, that meant faster performance on desktop computers, so the team came up with the SWT as an improvement over the standard Java approaches: Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) and Swing.

There are currently over 300 publicly available plug-ins for Eclipse, including the Assisi GUI Designer, Systinet's WASP Developer, the Eclipse Modeling Framework, Apache Tomcat and the CodeBeamer team collaboration system. There is even a C# plug-in from the French company Improve SA. The Eclipse Tools Project has plans for a C/C++ IDE, a Cobol IDE, an Automated Software Quality platform (Hyades), a Graphical Editor Framework and a Java/XML framework.

IDEs That Support Development for Java

Since 1996, many IDEs have been dedicated to Java. Progress has been rapid, leading to a shakeout--IBM VisualAge for Java, Microsoft Visual J++, Sybase PowerJ and Symantec Visual Cafe have all vanished from the scene. Their departure leaves Borland JBuilder the undisputed leader of the Java IDE sector, with a market share that is sure to have risen following Borland's acquisition of the WebGain installed base.

The only other major players are IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD), Sun ONE Studio and Oracle JDeveloper. Although there are dozens of lesser-known products from smaller suppliers, some of them strikingly innovative, only a handful have any substantial following. IntelliJ Idea and Omnicore Codeguide are two that often figure in developers' discussions about the "best" Java IDE.

A long shadow is gradually falling across the Java IDE sector, cast by the new and increasingly popular open source IDEs such as Eclipse and NetBeans. Java IDEs have always had a reputation for sluggish performance, due to the overhead of the Java Development Kit (JDK) and its graphical class libraries in particular. Respectable response time can usually be obtained by the simple expedient of using top-of-theline PCs or workstations. Plenty of RAM is the main necessity, with 512MB being the practical minimum and 1024MB desirable.

Borland JBuilder and Enterprise Studio for Java

As befits the market leader, JBuilder is an extremely comprehensive product. Its position has been reinforced by the downfall of WebGain, whose Studio was its closest competitor. Most of the WebGain installed base has gone to Borland, either directly or through TogetherSoft.

Borland released JBuilder 9 in May. Taking advantage of recent acquisitions (BoldSoft, StarBase and TogetherSoft) it has extended the product's boundaries to embrace most of the development lifecycle--although, as usual, most of the features needed for production systems development are restricted to the (most expensive) Enterprise edition. This has special facilities for deployment to no fewer than six leading J2EE application servers: IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, Sun ONE, Oracle 9i, Sybase EAServer and, of course, Borland Enterprise Server.

While JBuilder itself provides a measure of UML capability, this is limited to class and package diagrams. Together provides a reasonable alternative to Rational Rose for Borland users who want a complete UML workbench.

J2EE 1.3, XML, Web services, Corba, mobile and embedded software, database applications, re-factoring, code formatting, "hot deployment" of EJBs, debugging, unit testing, performance tools, version control... the list of JBuilder features goes on and on (it actually fills a 31-page document, one feature per line). Buying objections are more likely to be based on the product's sheer size and complexity than on anything it lacks.

Borland provides a free entry-level Personal edition, and an intermediate Developer edition aimed at expert programmers working with JSPs, servlets and Struts. JBuilder is available for Windows, Red Hat Linux and Solaris.

The top-end Borland Enterprise Studio for Java comprises:

* JBuilder Enterprise Edition

* CaliberRM (requirements management)

* Together Edition for JBuilder

* OptimizeIt Suite

* StarTeam

* Borland Enterprise Server

* InterBase

* JDataStore

WebGain Visual Cafe and Studio

WebGain went out of business last year, with its assets being acquired by Borland and TogetherSoft (which was itself subsequently taken over by Borland). At its peak, WebGain claimed over 100,000 users of its IDEs--Visual Cafe (inherited from Symantec courtesy of BEA) and the later, more comprehensive Studio.

Given the time lags that occur in the real world, many of those customers may still be using WebGain products. Borland offers them a range of migration programs and tools, and stands to increase its installed base significantly if users move to JBuilder.

IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD)

IBM first announced the WebSphere product line in May 1998. Since then, the WebSphere brand has surged irresistibly across IBM's software product lines, absorbing everything from ComponentBroker, MQSeries and TXSeries to portal, EAI and e-business packages. WebSphere has now become the public face of IBM's middleware, finally giving it a relatively stable platform that is relatively independent of the underlying operating system.

Obviously such a valuable corporate asset must be supported by all available means, and the most important objective was to provide suitable development tools. The WebSphere Studio toolkit, first shipped in September 1998, comprised VisualAge for Java, several products from NetObjects, and a core WorkBench with wizards, scripts and sample applications.

VisualAge was not up to the job, however. Originally written in Smalltalk and still containing code from the 1980s, it was notoriously slow and looked particularly bad in comparison to Microsoft's Visual Studio. So IBM and its subsidiary OTI, which had created VisualAge in the first place, went back to the drawing board and came up with Eclipse. The WebSphere Studio brand was retained for continuity's sake, but VisualAge was phased out behind the scenes.

WebSphere Studio is layered on WebSphere Studio WorkBench, which in turn is based on Eclipse. Among the various packages of WebSphere Studio tools, Site Developer focuses on Web services while Application Developer, which includes Site Developer, adds an advanced Java IDE and support for J2EE and data mapping. Wireless, voice, portlet and other development models can be slotted in as optional extras.

In an April 2002 announcement IBM described WSAD for Windows and Linux as "the industry's first integrated Web services, Java, J2EE, XML and Web development environments."

IBM announced WSAD 5.0 to accompany WebSphere 5.0 in September. Layered on Eclipse 2.0, it supports J2SE 1.3, J2EE 1.3, UDDI 2 and WSIL. Among its new features is the ability to create Web services that wrap entities such as JavaBeans, DB2 XML Extender calls, DB2 stored procedures and SQL queries. The Enterprise Edition also offers easy integration with all manner of "legacy" IBM assets, from Cobol and PL/I to CICS and IMS.

Sun ONE Studio 4

Sun has gone through a confusing series of policy changes since introducing Java in 1995. Right from the start it was aware of the danger of competing with its own licensees, and stayed aloof from the Java tools marketplace. A few years later, it decided to get more closely involved, but did so in a rather uncoordinated way, taking over several companies and assembling a heterogeneous collection of products.

Last year Sun at least chose to gather all its Java software under the Sun ONE brand, but Sun ONE Studio--the development toolset--still presents a rather variegated appearance. At least most of the code is now based on NetBeans; formally, though, it is available for Windows, Linux and Solaris only. Sun ONE Studio 4 comes in three graduated editions: Community (free of charge), Mobile and Enterprise. The latter includes Imperial Software Technology's X-Designer, integration with Apache Tomcat, and support for J2EE 1.3, Corba and Web services. A restricted edition of the PointBase Server pure Java RDBMS is also provided.

Sun ONE Studio packs a lot of functionality, but performance is sometimes sluggish on anything except a top-end computer. Its greatest weakness is the existence of Eclipse, which takes the principles behind NetBeans several steps further. Like Oracle JDeveloper, Sun ONE Studio is most likely to be used by committed Sun customers to create applications for the Sun ONE Application Server.

Oracle JDeveloper

Oracle was something of a laggard in the Java stakes--unsurprisingly for a company that has made a fortune out of focusing relentlessly on the database (and, later, business applications as well). Software development for RDBMS has been well understood since the mid-1980s, and depends heavily on the use of declarative SQL statements. These clash severely with object-oriented programming languages like Java. Similarly, Oracle's J2EE application server has achieved widespread penetration mainly by being offered as a lowpriced extra along with the RDBMS.

Nevertheless Oracle 9i JDeveloper is a considerable improvement on earlier releases, which were based on Borland JBuilder with some extra Oracle tweaks. The new product (relatively speaking) has been well received, and has been favorably compared with Visual Studio in some respects.

However, there are signs that Oracle is still out of step. It talks about JDeveloper's support for UML, but this is limited to class and activity diagrams. Oracle's submission of JSR 198 ("The Standard Extension API for Integrated Development Environments") to the Java Community Process (JCP) is another example. The media have obediently echoed Oracle's explanation that JSR 198 aims to avoid duplication of efforts by IDE vendors, but fail to notice that it essentially generalizes JDeveloper's user interface style. What is more, JSR 198 is based on the traditional Swing GUI class library, while the decision to use the faster Standard Widget Toolset (SWT) is fundamental to Eclipse.

JetBrains IntelliJ Idea

Whenever developers get into an argument about "the best Java IDE", the name IntelliJ keeps popping up. Idea is one of those pieces of software that people either love or hate, depending on what they expect of an IDE. It has powerful features for navigating source code, re-factoring, and smart editing. Despite Omnicore's claims to uniqueness, Idea also performs continuous code checking.

On the whole, Idea seems to appeal to experienced developers who have previously stuck to simple tools like text editors because they lack patience with the more elaborate IDEs like JBuilder. However, Idea does have its critics, and one common complaint is its lack of a GUI builder.

JetBrains, which was previously called IntelliJ, is a privately held Czech company whose goal is to create a set of "high-quality, innovative and easy-to-use" development tools. Although its products are not open source, its approach is community-based, which may help to account for its good track record of delivering features that many developers appreciate.

Omnicore CodeGuide

Omnicore Software of Karlsruhe, Germany, claims that its CodeGuide Java IDE is "unique in the world" on account of its on-the-fly code analysis engine. Instead of waiting for compilation, CodeGuide checks programs while they are being typed in, and shows any errors immediately. It even suggests improvements in code efficiency, based on inspection of the program as a whole. For instance, if a method is not used outside its own class, it can be declared private. Many other errors and poor practices are detected, with messages being color-coded to denote warning or error. CodeGuide, which also offers "advanced" refactoring support, is available for Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.

Others

This fourth category includes all IDEs that do not fit into any of the first three. That means any commercial products not exclusively dedicated to either Windows or Java, of which there are many. The four mentioned here are among the best. They include two multi-language, cross-platform tools (Kylix and CodeWarrior); and two special editions of Java IDEs that have been augmented with support for extra languages and platform-specific features.

Borland Kylix

Having competed with Microsoft for so many years, Borland must relish the freedom of engaging a market sector where its arch-nemesis has absolutely no presence at all. Kylix started out as a Linux port of Borland's acclaimed Delphi IDE. Shortly before Kylix was released in January 2001, a readers' poll carried out by Linux Journal showed that Delphi was the most requested port to Linux out of all possible applications. And an Evans Data study published in September 2001 revealed that Kylix had built up an impressive 12% share of the Linux development tools market within just nine months.

Borland has enhanced Kylix by adding support for C++ as well as the Pascal-based Delphi language. The Component Library for Cross-Platform (CLX) components created and used by Borland C++ Builder, Delphi and Kylix work on Windows as well as Linux. This allows developers to create single-source applications that can be compiled and run on both Linux and Windows.

Borland charges no royalties on database, GUI and Web server applications created with Kylix. The product comes in three editions: Enterprise, Professional, and a free entry-level Open edition. The top-end Enterprise edition includes database drivers for leading RDBMS, as well as BizSnap (for rapid Web services development), WebSnap and DataSnap (the middleware formerly known as Midas).

Metrowerks CodeWarrior

The Canadian company Metrowerks was founded in 1985, but did not release its flagship IDE CodeWarrior for Macintosh until 1994. CodeWarrior quickly captured 75% of the worldwide market for Macintosh development tools, with more than 100,000 registered users in 75 countries. Its success was partly due to Metrowerks' early decision to provide a plug-and-play system that allowed tool vendors to write their own compilers, debuggers, linkers and other tools to Metrowerks' APIs.

Today CodeWarrior runs on Mac OS, the Unix-based Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Like Kylix, it allows developers to target Linux and Windows with a single set of C, C++ or Java source code, and it throws in Macintosh, Solaris and PalmOS for good measure. (Actually, CodeWarrior was used to build the first PalmOS). Reflecting this wider platform coverage, CodeWarrior's user base has now grown to more than 200,000 programmers.

Sun ONE Studio 7, Enterprise Edition for Solaris

Although all the Sun ONE Studio products are now based on NetBeans, Studio 7 Enterprise Edition is the only edition that supports C, C++ and Fortran 95 as well as Java. However, it runs on (and targets) Solaris SPARC only. Much like Microsoft Visual Studio, this operating system specificity helps to attain the best performance and tighter integration with platform-specific runtime features such as multithreading and 64-bit computing. A variety of performance analysis and debugging tools are included.

IBM WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer

Just like Sun ONE Studio 7 Enterprise Edition, IBM WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer supplements a Java IDE with platform-specific tools. In IBM's case, Cobol, PL/I and CICS are the main "extras", added on to the basic package of WSAD running on top of Eclipse.

Conclusions

Our partitioning of the IDE market has simplified the job of picking winners and losers. In the Windowsonly category, Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET is the only serious contender, although Borland is close enough behind to make it look like a race. In the next year or two, Borland's .NET tools may become a serious competitor to Visual Studio .NET, an outcome that would be good for everyone concerned. There are only two major open source IDEs, and Eclipse is streets ahead of NetBeans--a situation that is unlikely to change. Indeed, the main question is how long NetBeans will continue to exist. No doubt Sun will nurse it along.

As for Java-only IDEs, Borland's JBuilder retains its undisputed lead for the time being. IBM, Oracle and Sun are some way behind, with many small, aggressive players Like JetBrains and Omnicore keeping the big vendors on their toes. As time goes by, however, Eclipse may begin to encroach on the territory of the proprietary IDEs, as it not only undercuts them on price but also begins to inch ahead in terms of leadingedge features.

The generalist IDEs will be with us for the foreseeable future, with Borland's Kylix and Metrowerks CodeWarrior among the most successful. Not everyone is ready to standardize on Java or .NET, and flexibility will continue to appeal to a significant subset of developers.

Support for Web services has become a necessity for all serious IDEs, although it is implemented in a variety of different ways. This is really just one example of the broader trend to pluggability, the tight integration of many different tools into a core IDE.

One of the most important themes of 2002 has been the growing popularity of Eclipse and NetBeans. Both are available free of charge, although numerous commercial toolsets are already based on them. The surprising fact is that many developers feel that Eclipse and NetBeans are actually better than the alternatives, or soon will be at the present rate of progress.

IBM representatives have talked up the notion that Eclipse is meant to take its place alongside Linux, Apache, Mozilla and other core open source software packages. Available on Windows and Linux, and initially supporting Java--although other languages, including Microsoft's C#, were soon added on by enthusiastic project members--Eclipse has become a rallying ground for the Java and Linux developer communities. As such, it has helped to staunch the steady drain of developer mindshare toward Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET.

A particularly convincing indication of this "leveling of the playing field" came with Rational's announcement of its new XDE software modeling tool last year. XDE was released with support for three IDEs: Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET, WSAD, and Eclipse itself. This had the effect of giving users of all three IDEs equal access to UML-based analysis and design.

Since Microsoft developers are notoriously contemptuous of modeling, and Microsoft itself has never warmed to UML, an OMG standard, the net result might be that XDE sees more use with WSAD than with Visual Studio .NET. This will become an increasingly important consideration, if and when Web services start to be used for large-scale commercial applications. The bigger and more complex a software system gets, the more it stands to benefit from a preliminary modeling phase.

In the past, big players like Borland, IBM and Microsoft could elbow their smaller competitors aside by sheer weight of innovation, or failing that, by outspending them on sales and marketing, or just cutting prices to the bone. Microsoft has always viewed its development tools business as a break-even proposition, knowing that the first step in gaining control of a market is to win the developers' allegiance. Visual Studio was a classic case in point: by offering support for multiple programming languages, plus all the tools the average developer would ever need, for about the same as competitors' single-language IDEs, Microsoft gave itself every advantage.

These factors, among others, have led to a massive shakeout in the IDE market. About half of the leading players six years ago have either quit or shrunk to the point where they no longer count for much. If things went on the same way for another six years, there might only be one or two big IDEs left (and we would put our money on Visual Studio being one of them).

But things are not going to be the same from now on. The advent of NetBeans and Eclipse has dramatically transformed the rules. Now, instead of being picked off one by one, the little players can band together and pool their efforts. After only 18 months, Eclipse already has more than 300 plug-ins. Hardly any of them could gain significant market share as standalone tools, but as a community they can incrementally improve the Eclipse platform until it has far more functionality than any proprietary IDE. The era of the proprietary IDE may be gradually drawing to a close.