So far though...

(Yes, I tried ActiveMQ as that would be my first choice due to the utterly irrational reason of tribal affiliation, but I've managed to lock the ActiveMQ broker up fairly easily with a simple stress test, and waiting to hear back on the user list regarding what I did wrong. So while I'm waiting, I'll play with OpenMQ and try not to fall in love.)

Despite coming here and working (remotely) here for years, I'm always amazed how rich the Bay Area is for tech acrivity - walking to QCon this morning, I noticed that there's also "Dreamforce", the Salesforce conference, going on at the same time. I suspect that there's no overlap in attendees for all three (except me, I guess).

Listening to Kresten talk about his Erlang implementation on the JVM. JErlang?

The interesting question is why are they doing this? Those of us that use IDEA, love IDEA. I've read some discussion about this (Cedric thinks they're doomed, Ceki isn't so certain) so I'll chime in - I think that this is less about the Java IDE, but more about broadening the product line and putting limited resources towards that goal.

I think there are a few things to consider. First, Jetbrains makes products that don't suck so they have a reasonable chance of bringing this non-suckage to other markets other than Java. IDEA IMO has long been the gold standard for what a Java IDE should be, and while I keep trying to switch to Eclipse, I always seem to come running back. Second, I think the tools market must be a really tough place to play so if you are in that space, you need to keep product lines fresh and relevant. (Borland who?) Third, while I think that Java is probably the best all-around platform for serious business system development, other things, like Ruby on Rails and PHP, really have momentum and mindshare when it comes to basic website development, and that's a huge market. And now having spent about 6 months actively working in a Rails shop, it's clear to me there are lots of things an experienced Java tool vendor can bring to the Ruby market.

Re the last point, clearly Jebrains isn't afraid to do this. They have had products for the .NET community for some time (Resharper which fixes Visual Studio's primitive refactoring support as well as a .NET profiler), build tools (TeamCity), a new bug tracker and RubyMine, an IDE for Ruby (I've used the Ruby support in IDEA and like it). I also just noticed they have a "Web and PHP IDE Preview" up on their site.

So color me hopeful - this isn't a move of desperation by a struggling company, but rather a tactical step to support a longer term strategy that broadens their product line and user base. Those of us that are IDEA fanbois aren't going to go away - I'll still get the Ulitmate edition (ok - so they aren't so good at naming...). But I know a lot of Ruby developers that could use some "surprise and delight" from Jetbrains...

This is great for many reasons.

First of all I'll be working on stuff very close to my heart: language and tools development. My #1 job at Unity is to make sure UnityScript remains the best language for game development inside Unity3D. A lot of love will go into friendlier error messages, long awaited features such as closures and generics, more reliability and great IDE support.

Boo users will like to know that UnityScript is written in Boo and it's based on the Boo compilation framework. Improving UnityScript means improving Boo.

And after 15 years in the computer industry I'm finally working very close to what got me into it in the first place: gaming. Believe it or not I had plans of becoming a journalist in my youth but SEGA saved me!

Back to work now, I have a game to write. :D

As usual, I'm always the last one to the party. This is nice! Mozilla - make this a standard feature!

I don't know what I like more - that someone figured this out, makes it free, that Canon built this into their product, that's it's accessible this way, or that Canon hasn't shut it down yet...