The anjuta story
It was back in 1999 when Naba Kumar released the first buggy alpha version of Anjuta, an IDE for GNOME which should pack together all the great command line development tools in linux and make software development easy on GNOME desktop.
Many people were interested in the project as Naba was very productive. Eventually the codebase grew, features were added, bugs were fixed and the IDE began to become very usefull. Anyway the frist stable release was made in 2002, Anjuta was not complete but it was an easy to use IDE, supported GNOME and GTK Projects in C/C++ and could also handle a couple of other languages.
After the release there were many discussion on how to improve the IDE and soon it came up that the design was too limited for future additions. Being based on old technologies, extending the IDE to add new features was becoming more and more challenging and less interesting. Then a decision was made to re-implement the architecture using newer gtk+ technologies which were not available then.
Incidentally, at that time revival of another project, gIDE, to attend the similar goal of an extensible IDE was undergoing. On 11/9/2001 the former gide developers and the Anjuta team decided to merge the two gnome ide projects. The new base for the development was the anjuta2 module but the new plugin code came mainly from the gide project.
In this time GNOME 2.0 was released which meant that Anjuta 1.0 did no longer fit very good into the rest of the Desktop because it used the old gnome 1.4 libraries. It became clear that anjuta2 would take a long time until it could replace Anjuta 1.0 so the developers decided to port Anjuta 1.0 to GNOME2 and to develop anjuta2 in parallel.
While this was a good decision development concentrated on Anjuta 1.2 the GNOME2 branch of Anjuta 1.0 because many people used Anjuta 1.0 and wanted to improve it and it was much easier to work on a working platform than on a design skeleton. Besides porting, many new features where added to Anjuta and Anjuta 1.2 became a much better application than Anjuta 1.0. On the other hand development of anjuta2 stopped more or less.
After Anjuta 1.2 was released in 2003 development of anjuta2 became more priority but there were disagreement between the two developer groups which ended up in the renaming of anjuta2 to scaffold. Scaffold was mostly developed by the former gide developers while Anjuta 2.0 was now developed on top of the old Anjuta codebase but with a new architecture. The goal of Anjuta 2.0 is to utilize all features of older Anjuta and to maintain the [release] continum, albeit in a new framework. All this resulted in some confusion in the community and people eventually started to think that both projects were dead.
Anyway, Naba always believed in his vision and implemented the plugin system and ported some older functionalities as plugins for Anjuta 2.0. Some codes were reused from former anjuta2 and the design is totally based on GTK+. Beginning fall 2004, the codebase reached some kind of usability and other developers were again interested at the project. The number of commits raised and now many functions of the IDE are working and it's getting better every day. After going low for about a year, Anjuta 2.0 is now finally ready for the prime time.
A Beta release is expect in early Febuary.
There is an unfortunate rumor that scaffold is no longer an active project. However, it should be noted that Anjuta 2.0 utilizes some cool libraries mainly developed during gide/scaffold era, namely gdl (gnome-development-library) and gnome-build framework.
What to expect from Anjuta 2.0?
Here is a wiki article that describes changes in Anjuta 2.0, along with some screenshots:
Anjuta2 Wiki
For more information about anjuta visit http://www.anjuta.org, post a message to anjuta-devel@lists.sourceforge.net or join #anjuta channel at GimpNet.