IDEs Are Dead. Long Live the IDE!

Using Eclipse for both Windows and Linux projects?? OMG - talk about devolving to the lowest common denominator

@Bob: My bad. I should have mentioned eXo. Thanks for then gentle reminder.

I'm pretty sure that Visual Studio is the best known IDE and not Eclipse. At least 95% of programmers known VS, whereas surely less than that know about Eclipse. Consider that not only does Windows development occur at a much higher volume than most other platforms, but also that most of the cross-compiling (e.g. to embedded and gaming platforms) is done on Windows.

I'm a bit biased because I'm involved with eXo, but have you checked out things like www.cloud-ide.com and the Cloud9 IDE? These are still kind of early, just like Google Docs was early a few years ago. But they are decent for "out of the office" updates. And with nice integration with things like Github, developers are no longer tied to their desktop Eclipse as the center of their universe. As your post articulates the center of gravity is shifting toward the cloud…

Well, no IDE spans all the major languages today. VS is a great IDE if you're developing on Windows. But if you're developing across platforms, then you're likely to need an alternative like Eclipse or Mono.

My Integrated Development Environment is called "UNIX"...

I was impressed with Palm's Ares project as a browser-based IDE. It used components that have become part of the Cloud9 IDE, I believe: http://c9.io/

Be careful, you may start an IDE war. Besides, there are a lot of developers out there using Visual Studio. VS cannot do Java, except maybe one of MS Java version. And, I'm sure that Eclipse cannot do VB nor C#. Sorry, I use VS.

I thought this article would shed some light on what an IDE might look like in the cloud and how well it would or would not work. So far I haven't seen an impressive web app ( HTML 5 or other ) that is feature rich enough to satisfy the needs of a good IDE.