A new series on IBM developerWorks shows what it takes to churn out integrated development environments (IDEs) as Eclipse plug-ins for any of the existing programming languages or your own language. It walks you through the two most important parts of the IDE -- the core and the user interface (UI) -- and takes a detailed look at the problems associated with designing and implementing them. Part 1 (requires registration) looks at creating the base of the IDE, called the core, on top of which all the other components of the IDE are built. It also discusses the general architecture of an IDE and examines techniques employed in the commercial ANTLR Studio IDE to solve some of the problems you may encounter while designing a core.