Hi Kilon,
Excellent observation!
The Glamorous Toolkit implements the idea of a Moldable IDE. The idea is simple: make it dead cheap for the developer to mold the IDE to his/her contextual needs.
Until now, we have announced an inspector and a debugger that do just that. The inspector makes it possible to mold the tool for every little object if you desire. For example, I alone have built literally hundreds of extensions for various objects. Actually, the inspector goes as far as to allow you to mold the flow to the context in which you are. The debugger lets you define custom debuggers that you can switch to while debugging. All these extensions are incredibly small (an object inspector extension has an average of 8 lines, and the debuggers we implemented consist of a couple of hundred loc), they are independent of each other, and they are put together through a small frame. Add to that the potential of using multiple rendering engines and we get a brand new philosophy that I believe holds the potential to change software development significantly.
This is not a far goal. It's a reality now. At ESUG, we will show how these tools work now in practice.
What Roberto is doing is complementary to our efforts. Data mining will certainly play a significant role in this picture, precisely when we will start to have thousands of these little contextual tools. At this time, DFlow is experimental, but eventually a tool like this should become part of the IDE as we need to understand how developers work in their context and what they need in their context. That is why his effort should be supported by our community. Please install it and give feedback.
Cheers,
Doru��