What is IDE?

An integrated development environment (IDE) (also known as integrated design environment, integrated debugging environment or interactive development environment) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of:

• a source code editor
• a compiler and/or an interpreter
• build automation tools
• a debugger

The boundary between an integrated development environment and other parts of the broader software development environment is not well-defined. Sometimes a version control system and various tools are integrated to simplify the construction of a GUI. Many modern IDEs also have a class browser, an object inspector, and a class hierarchy diagram, for use with object-oriented software development.

SOURCE: wikipedia