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My question refers to the information in this answer Force.com IDE - Still Officially Supported?, where a significant refactoring of the Force IDE is talked about that makes use of newer APIs and hopefully addresses some of the current weaknesses.

(This is different from the basic API version updates that just keep the Force IDE up to date with API version 27, 28, 29 etc.)

PS I am not looking for information about alternatives and would appreciate this not turning into a thread all about which set of tools is better.

PPS 50 points anyone?

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Disclaimer: this is a very unofficial answer, safe harbor, blah blah.

However, I have word from an unofficial source that the promised Eclipse IDE refactoring (Tooling API, general re-factor) has indeed been occurring and should be released around mid-year. Unclear if the open sourcing will happen at the same time, but if I had to call it I would say don't hold your breath on an open source release.

Update

The Force.com IDE has been open sourced.

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  • Indeed, at this point given the lack of any official updates, everything we can get is appreciated! Apr 23, 2014 at 15:44
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Keith, there are indeed more options available recently due to advancements updates in the Tooling API released by SFDC in the months since the original post was made...

...but they're probably not exactly what you're looking for.

Personally, I've recently shifted from an eclipse-based workflow to one built around SublimeText. Although this is largely due to my recent MacBook Pro purchase and the large and growing community of support around developers using OSX as their primary development environment, a big part of it has also been a reduction in the amount of SFDC development work I do on a daily basis. My reliance on he eclipse-based system fell as I needed less and less from my IDE for SFDC work...

All that being said, there are a couple of really interesting options that I think are worth considering:

  1. MavensMate - Joe Ferrara & DoubleSharp have been leading an active github developer community with a lot of commits over the last year and quite a bit of functionality being added and bugs being addressed. Not sure if you're ok with the base $70 license fee of SublimeText (even though it's really just to get rid of the nag pop-up, you can use it fully functionally to figure out if it's a good fit), but if you can handle that, MavensMate seems like the lead contender since SFDC abdicated the throne.

  2. BrainEngine - This one was mentioned in the previous thread you reference, but it too has seen significant development since that original post. It appears to have a significant amount of commercial backing and is quite a polished final product. They have a yearly license fee for the Developer version which appears most comparable to SublimeText + MavensMate, but it's a single tool suite so it may be easier to manage the change in your workflows only having to take on one new toolset.

  3. Cloudsole.com - This one is still in .1 release, but it's existing functionality looks pretty impressive. There's a recent blog post I'll link to in the comments since I don't have enough rep to post more than two links in an answer, but it's built on top of heroku and appears to at least have the deployment aspect down (not surprising since it's a heroku app itself) and a pretty decent compliment of IDE tooling already completed. It's also open source and hosted in github so any updated features you needed right away could be added in if you wanted to become active in its development community.

Of the three, MavensMate or BrainEngine appears to be the most mature, fully featured IDE's available built on top of the Tooling API, and from the (lack of) activity from SFDC in anything but Tooling API updates, your best bet may be to join the MavensMate / BrainEngine community.

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  • Here's the base url for Cloudsole, a walkthrough, and their github repo. Mar 24, 2014 at 20:59
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    Bryan, yeah I'm not looking for pros/cons of alternatives, just news - dates, roadmap - on the Eclipse tooling. So this doesn't answer my question.
    – Keith C
    Mar 24, 2014 at 21:05
  • Nice answer, but it specifically does what the OP mentioned he was NOT looking for. Mar 25, 2014 at 23:56
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    @VivekM.Chawla To be fair to Bryan, I added that comment to the question after he posted his answer. So although he didn't answer the question asked, he wasn't blatantly ignoring that. But thanks for reading carefully.
    – Keith C
    Mar 26, 2014 at 0:10
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    @BryanHoffpauir'BJHoffpauir' What has improved? Salesforce themselves have posted that only maintenance work such as supporting new API versions has been done in the last few years.
    – Keith C
    Mar 27, 2014 at 11:16

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