Mark Watson's opinions on Java, Ruby, Lisp, AI, and the Semantic Web

Usually I favor focused 'best of breed' software tools (e.g., IntelliJ for Java and web application development).

Lately though, I find myself using Eclipse a lot more because I can do so much in one environment (Java, Ruby, Python, and C++ development).

Eventually, for me, moving to a general purpose platform will reach a tipping point when more tools are written for the Eclipse platform. My wish list for Eclipse tools is:

• free UML tool with round trip for Java, Python, and Ruby
• Semantic web tools like Protege
• interface to an RDF repository like Sesame
• general purpose client that works with all relational databases that I need to use in my development

Some of these tools already exist in some form. I don't think that Eclipse will ever be as good as IntelliJ for pure Java develpment, but at some point it might be good enough.