An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is an application that facilitates application development. In general, an IDE is a GUI-based workbench designed to aid a developer in building software applications with an integrated environment combined with all the required tools at hand. Most common features such as debugging, version control, and data structure browsing etc. helps the developer to quickly execute the actions without switching to other applications. Thus, it helps to maximize productivity by providing similar user interfaces for related components and reduces the time taken to learn the language. An IDE can either support for single or multiple languages.
The concept of IDE evolved from simple command-based software which was not as useful as menu-driven one. The modern IDEs are mostly used in the context of visual programming wherein applications are quickly created by moving programming building blocks or code nodes that generate flowchart and structure diagrams that are compiled or interpreted. The selection of a good IDE is based on factors such as the language support, the operating system needs, costs associated in using the IDE etc.
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