IDEs - Integrated Development Environments - traditionally provide out of the box support for many of the tasks that go into making working software out of source code. But increasingly, developers expect to be able to use any one of a variety of special-purpose tools for each task. This shifts the focus of the IDE from “Integrated” to “Integrating” external tools into a coherent experience.

Especially in the Scala ecosystem, we have an increasing number of build tools to choose from. I have been focusing on integrating sbt and other new tools with the IntelliJ Scala plugin and will talk about challenges involved and how the Build Server Protocol makes it possible for IntelliJ to interface with any build tool.