Force.com IDE - Still Officially Supported?

As the original author of the IDE, I can understand why you would be unclear on the future of the IDE. Rather than say it has been deprecated I would say that it has been put in maintenance only mode, but IS supported. That is to say, that with each release of the platform, the next being Winter '14, the IDE will be updated so that the API endpoint of the SOAP API used by the IDE is current.

The IDE uses a combination of SOAP and Metadata APIs and to gain access to the most recently exposed metadata, this endpoint update, and re-compiling needs to occur. But, that is the extent of support that we are committing to with the current IDE code base.

The long term strategy is as described above. We have moved resource from adding new features to the IDE to developing an API who sole purpose is to support tooling. You can see the progress of the tooling API in the Developer Console, which is the first place that this API is being put to work. Once the tooling API has reached a level of functionality, we will revisit an Eclipse plugin.

tl;dr The IDE was built by salesforce Developer Evangelism for the reasons that you excellently point out above. It was built before we released a Metadata API even, mostly to gain the usefulness of an IDE, but the main reason was so that the developer had access to the built in source code control, something that is terribly important for real development and governance.

Due to the popularity and adoption by the developer community, the project was "forced" upon the R&D side of the house so that it could be properly supported and maintained. The code behind the IDE has evolved organically and over a lengthy enough period of time that the entire underlying implementation has rightly been called into question. Newer APIs exist that can/will be used in conjunction with the tooling API to deliver a better performing, less chatty IDE. Included in this is something akin to a grammer for proper code assist and refactoring, replacing the current polling mechanism with a streaming API mechanism and a better Visualforce editor.

The Force.com service is unique, so while we can borrow a lot of techniques and approaches, some aspects of this just have needed to be invented. Hopefully this demonstrates our commitment to the IDE and other tools like Mavens Mate and BrainEngine

EDIT: On September 17, 2013 the DeveloperForce blogs came out with the following article. Cliff notes:

  • We will be updating the plugin to work with the latest versions of Eclipse and Java shortly after the Winter ’14 release.
  • We have been finishing up the Tooling API to prepare for the more complete refactoring which is now in flight.

After the refactor:

  • Dynamic Metadata API: No more need to upgrade the plugin every release to get the latest metadata API. Latest and greatest available at all times.
  • oAuth: No more need to reset a security token and update projects with new credentials. oAuth authentication will keep your plugin authenticated to an instance until you tell it you don’t want to be authenticated anymore. Especially useful for those of you with admins requiring monthly password resets.
  • Code Completion: The Tooling API provides symbol tables for an org, which will be used to offer code completion. Developer Console offers this today; rebuilding with the Tooling API will allow the plugin to offer it too.
  • Better Save Process: The Tooling API provides a mechanism for saving code artifacts more directly than the metadata API, providing a much less unwieldy experience.
  • Plugin-only: The current approach of offering a bundled exe to install both Eclipse and the Force.com IDE plugin. We’ll be all plugin, all the time.

EDIT: On July 1st, 2014, the Force.com IDE Core has officially gone open source on GitHub. The community can now help maintain it.


We actually took a different approach, partially driven by the desire to use a more diverse set of development tools, but primarily to simplify development of multiple managed packages in a single Force.com dev org (per-developer, of course). We create a set of ant targets based on the Force.com Migration Toolkit that do the following:

  • Smart incremental save - "smart" meaning it ensures the package contains all dependencies of modified files as well; also stubs out meta.xml files for locally created source
  • Full save
  • Sync with server - Retrieves metadata, cleans it up (partitions by package removing implicit dependencies, restores unambiguous namespace qualifications that were removed when developing in a single org, etc.), shows a diff against local source in a comparison tool (either Beyond Compare or Araxis Merge), and adds synced files to SCM

We also created ant targets for a VERY simple source code formatter for Apex and a very simple rename refactoring target for Apex classes and custom objects.

These targets can then be easily and pretty seamlessly integrated into other IDEs and editors. For example, I use IntelliJ IDEA pretty much exclusively for Force.com development these days.

I'm also eagerly anticipating the arrival of real IDE plug-ins for Force.com dev, especially for IDEA, but this works great for us until then!


Fast forward to 2018 and the IDE landscape has changed a bit with Salesforce DX.

From Summer '17 to Spring '18 there was the Force.com IDE 2 (Beta). This has been discontinued:

The Force.com IDE 2 beta release has been discontinued. We are not providing future releases of this tool, and no downloads are available after May 3, 2018. You cannot access the Force.com IDE 2 Developer Guide as of April 23, 2018. We recommend using Salesforce Extensions for VS Code instead.

The original Force.com IDE is more complex as it is open source on GitHub. I see it was updated to the current (as at the time of writing) Spring '18 WSDLs. Other than that there appears to be no active development over the last year.

Comment from Wade Wegner (VP Product for Salesforce):

We will keep the existing Force.com IDE in OSS (and likely fix any major issues) but we will no longer invest in the Force.com IDE 2. Yes, consider using VS Code with our extensions.

So the current focus is on the Salesforce Extensions for VS Code and support for third party IDEs via the SFDX CLI and existing APIs.

See also:

  • Could an entry be added to the FAQ to explain future for Force.com IDE in relation to SFDX and Visual Studio code?
  • Summer '18 Release Notes - Force.com IDE 2 Beta Discontinued

Tags:

Ide

Recent Posts