Project to create a command line IDE. This is mainly due to the time it takes for maven to compile small changes in code and how poorly it integrates with vim/gvim. Along with a healthy distaste for one-size-fits-all IDEs.
So, this is what I get for starting a project with little more than a vague idea of what I want. After hacking around for awhile, I have to come to conclusion that an IDE requires a significant amount of configuration. Maven is lifecycle management tool, not a development tool. I feel that a very large amount of the benefit of clide will be in de-constructing the maven configuration into a format that is easily accessible from the command line. The first release of neovim has sparked a much renewed interest in this project. In the past week, I've hacked together enough to initialize a project, calculate md5s for poms and source files and generate classpaths.
I've come to realize that I need to modify my approach. I have been relying quite heavily on Ruby, and I will continue to do so, but I want clide to be wide open for any language a plugin writer may choose to use. Drawing heavily on the idea of git and it's genesis as shell scripts, that seems to be a good model. To that end, at the moment, clide will become little more than a tool to deconstruct pom.xml files and store them in a directory structure that can easily be consumed anything, but especially by shell scripts, as I feel that is the lowest common denominator, and is already a very well defined and well understood interface with stdin, stdout, and stderr. There may very well be faster ways to access this data, but that is a discussion for another day, when or if performance becomes a concern.