Choosing the Right Tools
Edward Grossman, Editor, ACM Queue
A Road Map for Finding the Right Tools Over the Coming Year

The use of tools is something very basic to who we are as human beings. No other animal so completely utilizes and fashions tools to ease complex or difficult tasks. From construction (hammer) to cooking (stove) to calling someone on the telephone (first the phone itself, then speed dial), no area of human life is untouched by tools. And software development is no exception.

In fact, the level of tool-sophistication in software development is nearly unparalleled. Firstly, software development is itself typically a building of tools for someone else, for example constructing an inventory control and billing system is ultimately a tool for the finance department. Secondly, the building of that tool (billing system) itself utilizes tools—tools for building tools, and these run the gamut from workstation and operating system up to programming languages and editing tools. And then the recursion gets increasingly fine-grained: the tools for building tools have their own tools. Integrated development environments (IDEs) can have plugins; plugins in-turn can pull in pre-built components (as can the IDEs); the resulting code can be managed as shared source; builds can be deployed to users; programs themselves then need to access data, often elsewhere; and the whole shebang needs to be debugged and tested. And that's barely scratching the surface. Whew.

So with all this mish-mash out there, how is one to know what's available in order to make decisions about which tools are right for you? It was with that question in mind we set out to create our 2005 Developer Tools Road Map—to help you survey the landscape, see what is (and will be) available, so you can make informed decisions when choosing the right tools for your next project.

Click here to read more and download our special 2005 Developer Tools Roadmap supplement. No registration required!