Mice or Raccoons II

Cote over at RedMonk took up the gauntlet I threw down in my blog and started to riff on the idea of an AJAX-based IDE. After arguing for AJAX, I'll now argue against it. You see, most developers already have an IDE and they're used to having all those features nearby; stripping features out to build an AJAX-based IDE wouldn't help them at all. And if you think about the last shrink-wrapped applications you probably bought, they were probably content generation applications like Photoshop or some video editing software -- software that really does get advantage out of using local resources like a graphics accelerator or local hard drive (which an IDE does, too).

Yet the idea sticks with me that for the "new breed" of application, a "new breed" of IDE seems required.