Many RIFE users have expressed their interest in adding intelligent support to their favourite IDE. We laid out a plan on the Wiki that shows what can be done to make our lives even easier if the IDE has better knowledge about RIFE projects.

Instead of just waiting for something to happen, Oliver Dohmen decided to start building a model-drive visual RIFE plugin for Eclipse and even made it his thesis project! He has been working on it for several weeks now and the results are starting to show:

While he will not be able to build a complete GUI for everything that RIFE provides, he'll try his best to get a usable foundation laid out by March. He plans to release it as open source as soons as he graduates.

This is great news for all the RIFE users that are working with Eclipse.

Stay tuned for further updates!