An Integrated Development Environment is a piece of software that provides facilities computer programmers for software development. It acts as a text editor, compiler, interpreter, debugger, etc. Typically an IDE is designed for a particular programming language but there are multi language IDEs that allow to handle more than one programming language.
Eclipse IDE: It is a free and open source editor upon which many development frameworks are relied. It is highly recommended by many professional developers. Eclipse has began as Java development environment, but it was later expanded as a system of lightweight plug-ins.
Netbeans IDE: It is a free and open source editor that supports many languages with more plug-ins and is also easy to install and can be used even by a beginner.
Komodo: This is an enterprise level tool that is best suitable for pro developers because of its higher price.
Microsoft Visual Studio: This is an IDE from Microsoft. It consists of code editor that supports intellisense. The built in tools include a forms designer for building GUI applications, database schema, etc.
IDEs for mobile development:
- Xcode: This is an IDE useful for creating iOS and mac apps. The IDE consists of an iPhone simulator and GUI Builder.
- Monodevelop: If you are working on .Net language and don’t want to use Microsoft Visual Studio, this allows you to port your apps to Linux while maintaining a single code base.
The above are the various types of IDE.