Monto: A Disintegrated Development Environment

Integrated development environments play a central role in the life of many software developers. Integrating new functionality into these environments is non-trivial and forms a significant barrier to entry. We describe our Monto architecture which aims to address this problem. Monto components communicate via text messages across an off-the-shelf messaging layer. The architecture imposes limited constraints which enables easy combination of components to form an environment. A prototype implementation shows that this approach is practical and shows promise for full-featured development environments.