The Force.com IDE and Mavensmate
With new tools that leveraged Metadata and Tooling APIs, it was no longer necessary to develop for the Salesforce platform from within the platform. To assist developers with this approach, Salesforce started looking at how best to deliver a standardized developer experience that matched the standards of the time. Let’s run through the tools available at that time.
The Force.com IDE
One of the early IDEs that took advantage of this was Salesforce’s own Force.com IDE.
Built on top of the modular plugin architecture of the popular Eclipse development environment that was predominantly used for Java, the Force.com IDE took advantage of the new APIs to allow developers to not only code with a proper editor but also to save their changes back in their development organizations, directly from the IDE, without having to switch back to the Salesforce user interface.
The Force.com IDE became very popular very quickly, as it was the...