I'm not normally one to endorse a particular product or company but in this case I really have to take my hat off to Atlassian and their plugin development environment for their products. I have had previous experience with contributing to a plugin but this was the first time I had started from scratch on a new plugin.
Getting going
First off the SDK creates you a skeleton of the project for which ever product you are creating the plugin for. This has an example of tests that you can run (very important) and also right away you can build your plugin, ready to install into the product.Running in situ
At this point you already have some working code, but the best thing is that you can run the full product right there from your plugin is built and then test it out on a running server. This allows extremely fast development, no downloading packages from a website, setting up a database, seeding it with data. One command at it's all up and running in a couple of minutes.
Rapid Development cycle
Since running up the server takes quite some time, the good people at Atlassian also provide a quick way to install the plugin once the server is running. All you need to do is to run another command, which compiles, packages and automatically installs your plugin to the running server in a matter of seconds, allowing you to test your changes in a very small amount of time.
The above coupled with very good API documentation really eases the pain of development.
And Finally...
All this means you get to focus hard on what your plugin is doing, and removes the cruft of having to worry about the environment that your plugin will run in. It is dead easy to get up and running and this is largely due to the work put in by the company in order to facilitate this.
Being involved in DevOps I want to be creating this types of tools for developers in my organisation so that they can also develop quickly and easily and not worry about how hard it may be to get their code deployed to a running environment.
Reference
https://developer.atlassian.com/docs/getting-started
https://developer.atlassian.com/static/
https://developer.atlassian.com/docs/getting-started/set-up-the-atlassian-plugin-sdk-and-build-a-project
