The New Face of Development
IDE team lead, Gordon Prieur, and I discuss the new IDE in Sun Studio 12.
The previous version, Sun Studio 11, is based on NetBeans 3.5.1, an older unique version originally developed for Sun Studio 9. Based on customer input and market research, we realized that despite popular wisdom that developers in this market only use vi/vim and emacs, there is a rapidly growing segment that not only uses IDEs, but expect quality ones in their C, C++, and Fortran toolchain. We noted a generational trend- younger developers had group up with quality IDEs on other platforms or with other languages. In addition, we found that developers found current IDEs on Solaris and Linux, including our own, unsatisfactory.
With this in mind, we invested into a next generational IDE. Sun Studio 12 is based on NetBeans IDE 5.5.1 with the NetBeans C/C++ Development Pack 5.5.1. We extend this, in Sun Studio 12, with support for dbx, memory debugging (RTC), performance analyzer, and thread analyzer. Instead of forking the NetBeans code base, we are leveraging the NetBeans IDE as a binary base- when you install Sun Studio 12, you actually get 2 directories in /opt: (example on Solaris)
/opt/SUNWspro
/opt/netbeans-5.5.1
While the loose coupling, architecturally, allows for quicker innovation, the unified experience continues to exist. In fact, this is a great example of leveraging the NetBeans platform and IDE, as our strategic partners do, which allows us to focus our investments on more on advanced features rather than IDE fundamentals. Here's a screenshot:
Posted at 11:16PM Nov 11, 2007 by Kuldip Oberoi in Work | Comments[0]