IDEs are Moving to the Cloud

During the early days of my career,  I used a variety of development environments, including the most popular Turbo C along with FoxPro, PowerBuilder, and Delphi before finally settling down with Microsoft Visual Studio. The first line of code that I have ever written was in QBasic running on Microsoft DOS. The editor had useful features like adding the line numbers and automatically converting the statements to uppercase. Hitting F5 would run the program instantly without having to switch to the command prompt.

The family of Visual Studio had a variety of tools bundled together — Visual C++, Visual Basic, Visual InterDev, Visual J++. During the late 1990s, when Microsoft started to see the Java threat looming large, it used Visual Studio as its ultimate weapon to combat the competition.

I was fascinated by Visual Studio for its powerful integrations with the operating system, databases, and design tools. The WYSIWYG interface combined with drag and drop canvas delivered ultimate productivity. And of course, the IntelliSense feature that brought the super cool code completion to the IDEs.

Delphi, PowerBuilder, and even Oracle Forms 2000 tried hard to beat Microsoft development tools but could make only make a little impact.

From the days of Turbo C to the latest browser-based development environments, IDEs have come a long way. And they are about to change some more.

The Changing Dynamics of Software Development

The last five years have seen a dramatic change in the software development lifecycle. The concept of Infrastructure as Code followed by the evolution of DevOpsculture left a strong impact on software development. Open source movement had also played a critical role in influencing the future of IDEs. The changing dynamics forced development tool vendors to go back to the whiteboard and redesign the IDEs from the ground up.

Here are a few trends that changed the face of IDEs:

Read the entire article at The New Stack.

Janakiram MSV is an analyst, advisor, and architect. Follow him on Twitter,  Facebook and LinkedIn.