IBM, Microsoft, Eclipse and Adobe Vie for IDE Glory at India’s

Premier Software Developer Awards

Bangalore, March 8, 2010: Integrated Development Environments have come a
long way since the days of punch card and paper tape entries. IDEs of today are
designed to harness a programmer’s maximum productivity potential by providing
highly integrated source code editors, compilers, automation tools and debuggers
amongst other tightly interweaved components. This trend percolated into all types
of programming -- from enterprise application development all the way through
embedded development. The key driving force behind this trend was the ever
increasing size of the application code.

The need to accelerate time-to-market through automation and the requirement to

facilitate training and increase a developer’s productivity also aided in this
transformation. This gave rise to the near ubiquitous availability and use of products
like Microsoft Visual Studio for Windows application development and the Open
Source Eclipse environment for Linux and other platform development. Another
popular feature built into the advanced IDEs of today is collaborative development
support, fostering code sharing among development team members.

As code size and complexity increases, each of these tasks (and others) becomes
more arduous, especially when using only command-line tools. While numerous tools
exist to integrate and accelerate the steps above (build scripts and make files, for
example), the dominant paradigm today streamlines development by integrating the
edit/compile/debug cycle (and other steps) through a point-and-click graphical user
interface — an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

In line with global trends, the democratic Great Indian Developer Awards Season III
shortlist votes (see pie diagram representation below from a sum total of 1,16,700
votes that were received in the shortlist stage) indicate that almost 100 percent of all
Microsoft Windows application development occurs in Visual Studio and related IDEs.
The majority of Java applications development is IDE-based, thanks to tools from IBM,
Symantec, Borland, and others. Most modern Web programming development
leverages IDEs especially on the Adobe Flash and Flex builder platforms. In the
embedded world, systems and firmware developers still prefer command-line
interfaces, especially for embedded Linux development. IDEs are however, preferred
for SoC code development in conjunction with verification and co-design paradigms.
(Voting is open from http://www.developersummit.com/gida3_llist)

Embedded applications-code developers, like their enterprise counterparts, tend to

leverage IDEs. Linux and other Open Source developers still prefer CLI tools, probably
from a decade of CLI-focused history and, until the introduction of Eclipse, because of
a fragmented IDE landscape. Tools and OS vendors like to market IDEs because they
provide an attractive demonstration vehicle and a more palpable, visible asset for
licensing than do CLIs. Managers like IDEs better than line developers, probably
because IDEs offer a neat vision of their team's development process; line engineers
like CLIs because they afford more control.

Saltmarch Media's annual Great Indian Developer Awards honors software products
across 12 categories, based on their productivity, innovation excellence, universal
usefulness, simplicity, functionality and most importantly on the ground feedback
from India’s software developer ecosystem. In the Development Environment
Category, the final shortlist consists of IBM’s Rational Application Developer;
Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010; Adobe’s Flex Builder; Popular open-source IDE –
Eclipse and Microsoft’s Expression Studio. Oracle’s JBuilder was the first IDE to win
this award in 2008 followed by Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 in the 2009 chapter of
the same awards.

If there is a particular development environment that you personally endorse to your

colleagues or you evangelize about them at the first opportunity you get, here is your
chance to vote for it (voting closes April 10 2010) and see it win this prestigious
award. Who knows? You could win along with it too. At the end of the voting process,
a lucky draw will be conducted and one person will receive a surprise gift from our
prize sponsor. So visit the 2010 Great Indian Developer Awards website and cast your
vote. It counts! (http://www.developersummit.com/gida3_llist)
A Saltmarch Media Press Release
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