This is indeed very cool, but i'd love to hear VMWare explain why they created this. Does anyone know? Hopefully one of the members of the team can pipe in and share with us some of the decisions that led to making this.
Hi. I'm one of the Scripted guys, let me chip in on that.
The team working on Scripted are also the guys creating language/framework tooling on the bigger IDE platforms - so writing Eclipse plugins. The real developers using those tools are starting to write more JavaScript whilst at the same time there is the new wave of developers coming straight into JavaScript who aren't great fans of IDEs - usually from the point of view that they are a bit 'heavy' for what they are trying to achieve. We even surveyed some teams about what they were using for JavaScript and that confirmed this tendency towards more lightweight editors.
We could have just done our usual thing and crank out more eclipse plugins but we wanted to investigate something more radical. I, myself, still use vi when I'm on the command line because it is so easy and just works. We wanted to create something with that convenience and speed but that had the key capabilities that can really help productivity - so early error indication through things like JSLint as well as good content assist and fast navigation.
We are also aware of the increasing buzz around Cloud IDEs and wanted to explore that too. We tried some prototype full Cloud IDE setups (so server side workspace with browser interface) but didn't get much traction. This approach of desktop client/server app with potentially movable server let's us start where we think users want us and grow to server side workspace setups later. I know this setup is working for me as we are using Scripted to develop Scripted.
Agreed, although there are a few examples of VMware employees creating internal tools that end up open sourced - Review Board is an excellent example (basically all the management tools in the ESXi environment, including the console UI, are written in Python/swig - they have sharp coders in many languages).
Maybe this falls into that category - vCenter Orchestrator workflows are all written in JavaScript (or at least,they used to be).
EDIT - Apparently this is based on Eclipse Orion, so unlikely it's something used in the way I postulated.
VMWare did acquire SpringSource. Even though they mainly focus on Java and the Enterprise they might have had some other development tools they had dabbled with. Perhaps there are some hints in the source of where the code came from.
They've got a LOT of teams. A large number of SpringSource developers are in North Sydney, Australia. So far as I'm aware, the Spring team probably aren't working on this.
