One of the biggest challenges faced by Java developers today is how to navigate the complexity of framework choices, open source, internal code, and deregulated technology standards trying to determine how to use and reuse them together in order to deliver high-quality solutions with ever-increasing time pressures. Java developers typically fire up their IDE of choice, start coding, and at the end of the day when they shut down the IDE, all of the knowledge of what was done in the IDE walks away with the developer. The artifacts, of course, remain, but the actually working knowledge of the application being created remains with the developer. Today's IDEs are unable to capture application evolution and the developer's intent, and package it meaningfully into reusable modules.

This white paper discusses how an IDE can be transformed from a generic IDE to an application-specific IDE, allowing it to play a central role in capturing the knowledge a developer has or gains over the course of creating the application, associating that knowledge in a meaningful with the application, and then using the knowledge to enable others to easily navigate and modify that application without having to go through the same learning process all over again. Explore how a technology, known as Application Factories, enables an IDE to manifest application-specific metadata with interactive, just-in-time tooling. Learn how developers can customize applications more efficiently, greatly reducing the cost and overhead associated with the complexity of today's applications.