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Corporate Mergers, Tighter Integration
Specialty tools companies are dying or consolidating as the industry moves away from IDEs and toward development suites
by Andy Patrizio

Unlike many other software sectors, the application development market has thrived and kept a healthy population of small shops among the dominant players, where a dozen bright programmers and one marketing person can produce a specialized product for a market. However, life may get a little tougher for specialty tools vendors as the industry veers very strongly toward complete application development suites that handle everything from the design and modeling of an application through development, testing, and deployment.

This trend is most apparent in recent months with IBM buying Rational Software and Borland Software buying both StarBase and TogetherSoft. The acquisitions gave both companies what they lacked—in IBM's case, a modeling tool and in Borland's case, modeling and code management programs.

Slowly but surely, the major players in the Java application development market are moving away from the standalone Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to a complete, end-to-end suite of tools that handle a project from cradle to grave, or deployment in this case. This situation is driven by the difficulty in writing Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications, according to John Meyer, senior industry analyst with the Giga Information Group. "Borland and IBM have made these acquisitions to strengthen their tools and make it easier for the average developer to build systems in the Java space. And they believe that to do that most efficiently, they need to cover all aspects of a life cycle," he said.

Martin Heller, author of several books on programming and a columnist for Byte.com on programming, agrees on this point. "Where Java has really succeeded is on the server in the enterprise, and it's very complicated to use J2EE in a significant application. You need assistance from design tools to make it work," he said.

These suites are aimed at the enterprise developer because there isn't much of a market for the single, standalone developer. "Underneath all this merger and acquisition activity is the plain fact that desktop Java really didn't make it. I'm impressed at how good TogetherSoft ControlCenter is, considering it's written in Java. It's a very rare example of Java working on the desktop," said Heller.

These developments all points to the IDE disappearing as a standalone product; it either becomes part of an application development suite, which Borland and IBM are doing, or it will disappear altogether, as was the case with WebGain. At one point, Visual Café was a dominant Java IDE, but it couldn't survive as a single product in a suite-driven market.

"If code-centric development and IDEs are becoming a commodity, [Borland and IBM] realized they needed to put together a higher level of design abstraction to make developers more efficient, and you can increase the overall efficiency if the tools are more tightly integrated into the full life cycle," said Meyer.