I recently started working on Eclipse plugin development, and it’s quite a complex beast… so I think you might run into a shortage of developers who are proficient in both the Eclipse platform AND the mozilla platform to be able to build a really integrated environment.

I’m sympathetic with your viewpoint from an educational standpoint. I actually didn’t start developing in TurboPascal, I started by hand-assembling for the Apple II/Motorola 6502. I wouldn’t want to see “real programmers” start with a visual environment that hides a lot of the complexity of what’s happening under the hood. Ideally professional software developers should understand everything that’s going on, way below the level of the OS shell (processor-level optimizations, etc.).

That said, there is a huge community of programmers who are not professionals, and part of our job is to make as much programming goodness available to them as possible. Also, I find that a good IDE makes me far more productive, even though I could do without if I absolutely had to. You’ll pry my visual debugging environment from my cold dead hands, buddy!

I suspect this has a great deal to do with the
toolset available (or permitted) in academic
coursework.

Furthermore, IDE users do seem less willing to
experiment with changing the underlying build
system of a codebase (auto* to CMake, etc.).

If one were simply maintaining an older set
of code (90s C++), I can see how an IDE might
help — I’m not convinced that they are suitable
for new application development; after all, how
many have full support for C99 features recently
introduced in the GCC 4.2/trunk series ?

I don’t hire those who can’t work
with a toolset from top to bottom.

It’s a tough policy, but I can’t
afford to hand-hold supposedly
proficient “programmers” who need
security blankets — clients rarely
have licenses for fancy IDEs.

I have an embedded app that wants to be a XULRunner app but the time doesn’t seem quite right to switch.

Initial content development was difficult—no Venkman, or other extensions in the embedded app—and was mostly done in a browser that was missing the extra functionality of the full app. There was also a lot of debug-by-alert when internal features were needed.

XULRunner looked like a good way to get access to extensions but I instead choose a hybrid path of sorts: I wrapped the embedded app’s c++ code in a component, added/changed some “glue” and wedged the app into Firefox via a command line handler (a small javascript file inserted in the right place allows me to hijack the browser for development)

We can now develop custom-application content using every Firefox extension in existence. After debug-by-alert development, I find it hard to be too critical of Venkman…

So we have a kludge solution that works fine for us. Reaching this point was a lot more complicated that the last few paragraphs imply. The makefiles alone…

There are numerous Development Environment issues that hopefully can be resolved independent of their eventual inclusion in an overall integrated solution.

first off, I share your fate of having started out using IDEs (Borland C++, in my case, both on DOS and Win 3.1). I’ve since gone down the Emacs path for most of my early Linux work, and got reasonably proficient at it. However, I was an instant-switchover to Eclipse once I saw it, and even though I switched to NetBeans now (mostly for the better C++ and UML tools), I didn’t regret it one minute.

The most important reason was its CODE MODEL. A code model, as you probably know, lets you do all sorts of nice things in a semi-intelligent manner, like renaming a method (not the same as replacing a string), refactoring, and so on. You probably could build a code-model-based editor but I haven’t seen one, yet.

Obviously, for the same reason, you’ve got a tough job before you in doing an IDE for web-development — there is not just one but many different models to support.

That said, I would strongly recommend against building a new IDE from scratch. Of course, it may sound like “doing what you preach” in using Firefox when you’re out there advocating Firefox as the platform. However, it really isn’t. Its just an enormous waste of time because tool building is always distracting. Also, the requirements of an IDE are likely to be quite different from the requirements of a typical Firefox app, so you’re not even getting much out of extending the platform for the IDE case.

Additionally, multi-platform is the key, in my case. I don’t want an IDE that I can use only for Firefox development. I do more than just Firefox development and I want one IDE for all of it.

My personal recommendation would be to have a look at NetBeans — they’re open, cross-platform, much less convoluted, and their team is based in Prague