Salesforce Discusses Its Eclipse Plugin Release Approach

by Kin Lane on 02/04/2013

Salesforce talked a little bit about its strategy around the development and release strategy around the Salesforce Eclipse plug-in. Providing a little transparency into how they stagger its API releases as well as waiting to release their Eclipse plug-in, until API release is complete.

I’m more interested in this story from an API building block perspective. An eclipse plug-in seems like a building block for only the most mature APIs out there, and especially ones targeting the enterprise. An eclipse plug-in is not for every API, but I think I will add it as a building block to consider.

It also seems like something a 3rd party provider could step up and find success with as well, by building a single or suite of Eclipse plug-ins that provide integrated API developer tools across popular or high value web APIs for Eclipse users.

I believe IDE plug-ins for APIs will be one way we can provide API discovery solutions for developers, by bringing valuable, qualified API resources into their development environments.