Thinking from the team management perspective, the most important features for me are

• support for multiple development languages
• support for integration with 3rd party and in-house tools:
  • ability to customize based on data stored in files and environment variable - ideally without having to copy data stored elsewhere for other tools into a tool specific format.
  • ability to accept inputs and send outputs to third party tools
  • ability to customize the entire menu - not just a dedicated list of plug-in menus
  • ability to integrate custom version control systems, build systems, debugging tools, diff support, refactoring tools, project management tools, and so on.
• ability to set site wide defaults
• ability to bundle up and distribute customizations
• ability to layer personal customizations on top of sitewide defaults
• not too difficult to learn customization/integration interface

If all of the above exists we can make, buy, or download the rest - syntax highlighting, etc.

Nice to haves would include:

• trouble-free support for local editing of remote files
• built-in syntax highlighting that can be replaced with custom tools.
• built-in jump to error API (to facilitate integration with custom debugging tools)
• built-in space-to-tab management
• A robust plug-in/add-on development community
• A customization language that lets team members customize their tools using whatever language they typically program in. A second best would be a language that is commercially important to us so that form-fitting tools to one's work habits also encourages/reinforces languages that I would want all team members to know. An IDE with Perl as the customization language would definitely pass that requirement!

Best, beth

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.