IDEs need become Open Data platforms (As need languages and VMs)

Development environments have put quite some effort into being open platforms, however rewriting our own tools as plug-ins we found that while host platform and other plug-ins are open for addition of feature they are typically closed to accessing data. We report from our own experience rewriting the Codemap tool as an Eclipse plug-in as well as from maintaining the Moose platform and argue why IDEs need to adopt an Open Data paradigm to become valuable targets for development of novel tools. We propose that data created by plug-ins need to default to being openly shared with other plug-ins through uniform data structures. Adding appropriate meta-information to this setup will allow other plug-ins to even make use of this data in unanticipated ways. We further argue that opening up data should not stop at the development platform but that programming languages and even virtual machines should also open up their internal data for the greater benefit of development tool and API designers.