Several major Java tools vendors, including Oracle and Sun, are forming a standards group in order to promote interoperability between different toolsets, and in particular, IDEs.
The move is seen as one attempt to promote and construct IDEs that are comparable in functionality to Microsoft’s VisualStudio.NET – last year at JavaOne Sun made several statements refering to the need to reduce development complexity in the Java API arena, and produce quality tool sets.
This group may be looking at the ability to build a common add-on framework so that most IDEs can share add-ons and plug-ins.