The Artima Developer Community
Sponsored Link

Java Community News
JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA 7, Milestone 2

5 replies on 1 page. Most recent reply: Aug 17, 2007 12:47 PM by Adam Krieg

Welcome Guest
  Sign In

Go back to the topic listing  Back to Topic List Click to reply to this topic  Reply to this Topic Click to search messages in this forum  Search Forum Click for a threaded view of the topic  Threaded View   
Previous Topic   Next Topic
Flat View: This topic has 5 replies on 1 page
Frank Sommers

Posts: 2642
Nickname: fsommers
Registered: Jan, 2002

JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA 7, Milestone 2 Posted: Aug 16, 2007 8:53 AM
Reply to this message Reply
Summary
JetBrains released a new milestone build of its upcoming IntelliJ IDEA 7 development environment. Artima spoke with IDEA lead developer Dmitry Jemerov about upcoming features of this popular Java IDE.
Advertisement

JetBrains released this week the Milestone 2 version of its IntelliJ IDEA 7 development environment. In this brief interview with Artima, Intellij IDEA lead developer Dmitry Jemerov talks about support for enterprise frameworks, Ruby and Groovy, team development, and what sets IDEA apart from other Java IDEs:

Frank Sommers: What are main new features in the upcoming release?

Dmitry Jemerov: This milestone release continues in all the directions we had set for version 7.

First of all, we're trying to provide more support for lighter-weight enterprise development technologies: Spring and Hibernate, in particular. Support for Struts was introduced in version 6, then in version 7 we're adding Spring and Hibernate. That support is quite advanced. For example, we introduced Spring AspectJ support in Milestone 2, which is one of the major new features. We also provide some support for JBoss Seam.

Another area we're working on is to deliver an even more productive environment for teams of developers. For instance, we're provide better assistance for mixed-IDE teams, integration with the Maven project, and you can import Eclipse projects directly to IDEA.

We've also been working on improving our version control support, and especially to make you better aware of the changes your colleagues are doing to the code. For example, if you open a file that had been modified by someone else and that you have not yet updated to the latest version, you'll see an immediate notification so that you don't start changing an old version of a file. We also provide quite a nice interface for viewing the history of recently committed changes so you can see who did what, where, and why.

A lot of people are now interested in dynamic languages, and in that connection another area we're making progress in is Ruby support. We started the Ruby development work some time ago, and it has proven quite popular. Now we're introducing a Groovy plug-in. Even though it's just a preview release, it's already quite advanced. We support Rails projects in the Ruby plug-in, and the Groovy plug-in supports Grails.

We have less extensive support for some other languages, too. Scala is an example, which is still a research language, and is not something that's commercially used. We do have a Scala plug-in as a prototype, but we're not actively developing it because we do not see the commercial interest yet. The language itself changes quite a lot right now, and it's a bit hard to track all those changes. So we postponed that work for a while, but we may resume it if we see demand for it.

Frank Sommers: There are many high-quality Java IDEs now in the market. What's the most important characteristic that sets IDEA apart from other Java IDEs?

Dmitry Jemerov: Our attention to small details is quite a bit higher than that in other IDEs. For example, our refactorings work successfully in some cases when other IDEs fail or even produce incompilable code. We add many small usability features all the time. We don't list those in the What's New page on our Web site because there are too many of them: We add lots of those features all the time. I believe that the cumulative effect of all those small, yet significant, differences keeps us ahead.

The final release of IDEA 7 is planned for the end of this year.

What do you think of the direction IntelliJ IDEA is taking?


Nick Evgeniev

Posts: 16
Nickname: nevgeniev
Registered: Aug, 2007

Re: JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA 7, Milestone 2 Posted: Aug 16, 2007 12:52 PM
Reply to this message Reply
Groovy & spring support are big pluses

but the performance improvements claimed for 7.0m2 are fiction. It is still *times* slower than 5.1 on loading project.

Dmitry Jemerov

Posts: 2
Nickname: yole
Registered: Aug, 2007

Re: JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA 7, Milestone 2 Posted: Aug 16, 2007 1:45 PM
Reply to this message Reply
Nick,

The performance improvements are definitely not fiction because we have measured them, and our users have confirmed that they see the improvements as well. We will be happy to investigate why you don't see them for your project.

One possible reason is that you only tried to open the project once. The first opening indeed takes longer because a lot of caches are being built or rebuilt. Subsequent project openings should be considerably faster.

Jónas Tryggvi Jóhannsson

Posts: 3
Nickname: deus
Registered: Dec, 2003

Re: JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA 7, Milestone 2 Posted: Aug 16, 2007 3:40 PM
Reply to this message Reply
Hi Dmitry. Just wanted to start off by saying that I'm a big fan of IntelliJ's IDEA! I've used to use it from the beta of version 3 until version 5, and I'm' still amazed how productive it made me. I even got my university to switch from JBuilder to IDEA 3, which made everyone very happy ;)

BUT! My company switched from IDEA to Eclipse some years ago, as it has a huge codebase in many different projects - which just seemed to be too much for IDEA to handle. That is why the ability of opening Eclipse projects is a great addition!, as we can then start to use IDEA again for refactoring code that Eclipse cannot handle, which will probably lead some of the developers to switch to IDEA full time (if the performance issues have gone away). I'll give that new milestone a try asap.

Secondly; I love that you guys are adding Ruby and Rails support. As that is the other platform that I actively develop for, then I can't wait for giving it a shot.

One question though; Does IntelliJ have the auto build feature like Eclipse has? as we are mainly developing Swing apps or server code, we have really gotten used to that feature..

Dmitry Jemerov

Posts: 2
Nickname: yole
Registered: Aug, 2007

Re: JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA 7, Milestone 2 Posted: Aug 17, 2007 2:55 AM
Reply to this message Reply
Hi Jonas,

Thanks for your feedback!

No, we don't right now have the auto-build feature similar to what Eclipse has. We have a different option which can be just as convenient when developing server-side applications: build and deploy on frame deactivation.

Adam Krieg

Posts: 1
Nickname: deaddowney
Registered: Aug, 2007

Re: JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA 7, Milestone 2 Posted: Aug 17, 2007 12:47 PM
Reply to this message Reply
Please DON'T add auto-build as a standard feature. I have to switch back and forth between Eclipse and IntelliJ and hate the fact that Eclipse rebuilds the workspace after every little thing you do. I much prefer building when I want to, not before.

Flat View: This topic has 5 replies on 1 page
Topic: CodeGear Releases JGear, a Trio of Eclipse Plugins Previous Topic   Next Topic Topic: YSlow: Yahoo's Latest Tool Provides Performance Answers

Sponsored Links



Google
  Web Artima.com   

Copyright © 1996-2019 Artima, Inc. All Rights Reserved. - Privacy Policy - Terms of Use