MavensMate is a tool that powers open source Force.com IDEs in various text editors across various platforms
OK, it WAS. But now, we've rewritten MavensMate to be a cross-platform, text editor agnostic tool for developing Force.com applications. The Sublime Text plugin still exists, it just utilizes the newly rewritten APIs in this project.
mm is the executable that performs the heavy lifting. It can create new projects, compile code, move code between orgs, run apex tests, etc...and it's all JSON-based. Simply feed it JSON to provide context to your request, and it will respond in JSON. Here's an example:
$ mm -o compile_project <<< '{ "project_name" : "myproject" }'
{
"success" : true,
"body" : "Your operation completed successfully"
}
For more information on mm's capabilities, head over to the README
mmserver is a local http server that the out-of-box MavensMate UI uses to interact with the mm tool. The OOB MavensMate UI is written in HTML/CSS/JS, so to maintain a solid user experience, it makes Ajax calls to a local web server which in turns makes all the terminal calls to mm. If you're writing a MavensMate plugin, your UI can use mmserver or you can simply call mm directly from your plugin's UI.
Pick your favorite text editor with extension capability and utilize the mm and mmserver tools to build fully-functional Force.com IDEs