MidPoint may have started as a humble identity management tool, yet it has evolved into identity platform. MidPoint is comprehensive, flexible and customizable. MidPoint configurations can be quite complex and it may be a challenge to manage them. Therefore we have prepared an integrated development environment (IDE) to make this work easier: MidPoint Studio. We have just released its “beta” version.
The idea of midPoint IDE is not a new one. There has been an unofficial midPoint plugin for Eclipse IDE for quite some time. However, this plugin originated as a side project of one of midPoint developers. It was an experiment that somehow escaped from the laboratory. The Eclipse-based IDE became quite popular. Yet, the code was quite “experimental” and it was difficult to maintain. Moreover, midPoint development migrated away from Eclipse IDE towards more convenient IntelliJ IDEA. The Eclipse plugin has never been official and it started to fall apart. Yet the community wanted (and needed) an IDE tool. Therefore it was high time to do something about it.
New IDE was based on newer midPoint concepts. It was also based on a different IDE platform. We have chosen IntelliJ platform over Eclipse. IntelliJ is much more convenient and polished platform. Similarly to Eclipse, IntelliJ platform is open source. We have used IntelliJ as a foundation for MidPoint Studio, an integrated development environment to develop and maintain midPoint configurations.
We have just released a beta-quality version of MidPoint Studio (4.2-150). The Studio is pretty much feature-complete at this point. There may be some bugs and glitches, which is also the reason that we are releasing it to the community. We would like to gather community feedback before our first official release. If you are interested, please navigate to the Studio page at docs.evolveum.com and give it a try. Please share your feedback on midPoint mailing list. We would like to hear whether you like the Studio, if it works for you and what can be improved. You are welcome to report bugs using the usual procedure. Just make sure you set the component field to “Studio” and include Studio version number in your report.
We plan to release production-quality MidPoint Studio after we gather the community feedback. The plan is to maintain and officially support the Studio starting with that release. MidPoint Studio will become the official IDE for midPoint.