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IntelliJ IDEA goes open source
- stevoski 17y agoAstonishing news. This is either very good - or a sign that JetBrains is in trouble, and therefore very bad for us fanatic Java developers and IDEA fans.
- rayvega 17y ago...or a sign that JetBrains is in trouble... That might not be the case. One of their other products ReSharper, the .NET equivalent of IntelliJ IDEA, is popular in the .NET world. Perhaps that is doing better in sales and they are shifting their attention on what has greater growth potential. Maybe it is another sign of C# supplanting Java as the more trendy development language for your average developer?
- smhinsey 17y agoI've brought ReSharper everywhere I've been and it's resulted in pretty significant purchases every time. It's a truly fantastic product. I really hope that this doesn't turn out to be a bad sign.
- ilyak 17y agoSo you are assuming that there exist a developer for which Java was trendy until recently. And that now C# is trendy for the same developer. Anyway, "trendy for average" is oxymoron.
- gaius 17y agoI think you mean tautological.
- ilyak 17y agotautology is repeating something which is obvious. oxymoron is something that doesn't make any sense. "trendy" is something new that exceptional people to, contrary to what everybody does. "trendy for average" is wtf.
- gaius 17y agoNo, trendy is something people do for no reason other than everyone else is doing it. It is practically the definition of a popular programming language. Exceptional people are ahead of trends, by the time a trend is established they have moved on.
- brianm 17y agoSadly, it is a fairly crippled version. It looks like they open sourced the basic framework and some core modules, but keep the important ones behind the $600 barrier. This may actually backfire as folk's willingness to pay $600 for JSP debugging is questionable.
- dschobel 17y agoSo is it crippled or is it a bad business move because it's not crippled enough?
- ComputerGuru 17y agoCan't it be both at once?
- bokchoi 17y agoIt doesn't look too crippled to me. The features I personally would be missing are HTML, JS, CSS, Servlets, and JSPs. http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/editions_comparison_matrix.html http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/editions_compariso...
- amichail 17y agoGoogle App Engine is not supported in the free version.
- kaffeinecoma 17y agoNor is GWT, unfortunately. Then again, it's only $600 to get these features vs over a grand previously.
- jollojou 17y agoThe JEE application servers are not supported either. But his is not a big issue, since one can always start the app server outside IDEA and still be able to debug it with the Community edition.
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- kaffeinecoma 17y agoSite seems overloaded. Mirror, anyone? This is awesome news... I was hoping for something like this now for quite a while. IntelliJ is just so much better than Eclipse (this from a paying customer now for about 3 years.)
- whirlycott1 17y agoWhat do you like about it over Eclipse? In my estimation, Eclipse has more momentum over anything else, primarily NetBeans (which is quite good, actually) and IntelliJ. And momentum counts more over the long run.
- locopati 17y agoIf you're trying to get work done, quality counts quite a bit. While Eclipse is a nice tool, IDEA is a professional tool that shows the attention to detail put into a professional-level product (better integration of aspects of the application, rough edges polished off, well-written docs, etc). If you're writing Java code professionally then IDEA is worth the money in time it'll save you 'over the long run.'
- kaffeinecoma 17y agoI definitely hear you about momentum. That's why the open-source move excites me. IDEA always just seems to be much better at navigating and "connecting" parts of a complicated codebase. For example, in GWT, I can command-click (this is on a Mac) on a GWT style-name in a Java class, and it will bring me to the relevant part of the style in the CSS file. Same thing for Spring integration- it can connect all your code to your Spring XML config seamlessly. When you ask it "find all uses of this class/interface/member", it just does the right thing, whereas with Eclipse it often seems to miss things. Refactoring especially, in Eclipse seems to miss a lot of things that IDEA gets right. I had the "misfortune" of having learned IDEA as my first IDE. So I am forever spoiled now. You could say that I am biased towards IDEA because it's what I learned first, and you'd probably be right to a certain extent. I tried on several occasions to migrate to Eclipse, with the intent of lowering the communication barrier between me and my colleagues. But each time I ended up going back to IDEA because it just works so much better at navigation. If you work in big codebases this becomes really important. Before IDEA I used to use Emacs and the command line exclusively.
- ilyak 17y agoSuddently. However, I had my cow orker try it another day, and we've failed to find a way to visually synchronize project with repository, like you do in Eclipse. Therefore, threw it out.
- Tichy 17y agoNot sure why you where downvoted. Your story supports what I suspect: that it is just what people are used to, not the inheritent qualities, that make people say IntelliJ is so much better. Probably there is a visual merging thing in IntelliJ, just as the features people are missing in Eclipse are probably also there - if you know how to find them.
- ilyak 17y agoI've asked on ##java and nobody could tell me how to get visual merging in IDEA. Sad.
- shiranaihito 17y agoAs far as I can tell, you get it automatically when using CVS or SVN. And no, it's not just what people are used to. Earlier this year, me and another guy converted a few developers from Eclipse to IDEA and they were all really happy about discovering it.
- ilyak 17y agoI do not understand what's "automatically"? I want to see which changes are due, and which changes are to be imported. Like one does in eclipse under Team -> Synchronize with repository. I fail to find such a mode in IDEA. Noone is yet to point me to it.
- shiranaihito 17y agoWell, in my experience IDEA gives you a "visual merge" when there are conflicts. You have a three-column view with the local version on the left, the merge in the middle, and the changes on the server on the right. Then you can pick and choose which changes to include and which ones to revert, and their locations are all marked with red and green colors on the sides (of the columns). I assume that's what you meant, and I don't remember ever having to "opt in" for that functionality. Btw, it's possible that the people on #java were all using Eclipse :)
- jeremychone 17y agoIMO. Too late and not enough. It might stop the erosion, but won't get new developers (IMO)
- bdittmer 17y agoHeh, if a java developer is worth his salt he will eventually be using idea. It's heads and shoulders above every other Java IDE out there.
- axod 17y agoThe Java developers I've known who are worth their salt, don't use IDE's :/
- anonymousDan 17y agoReally? What do they use then?
- kaffeinecoma 17y agoIf they're not using an IDE, then they've not yet worked on large projects. Either that or they're doing themselves a serious disservice. This from a hardcore Emacs-and-shell guy until fairly recently...
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- scorpioxy 17y agoWhatever their motives might be. Kudos. When i was working in Java world, i could never get any employer to pay for IntelliJ and had to stick to reading how awesome it was. Now, I would at least get a chance at trying it out.
- projectileboy 17y agoThis means you now have a free Arc IDE, by the way :-)
- strlen 17y agoJust searched for this and found it: http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=2043 http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=2043 Wow! I've always thought the Lisp machines' environments as being an inspiration for the modern third generations IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ). Now this seems to have come full circle.
- projectileboy 17y agoThanks. Send me an e-mail if you run into any issues.
- capablanca 17y agoHow hard is it to support a new language, compared to writing an Emacs mode?
- projectileboy 17y agoIntelliJ makes it shockingly easy to add custom language support. The main problem is that the documentation is scant and scattered. I've never written a line of elisp (I've hardly even ever used emacs), so I can't compare. Anyone else?
- mryall 17y agoThe omission of the HTML, CSS and JS tools in the community edition is a bit of a shame. I can't imagine that much Groovy and Scala code is written that isn't related to a web application. I use IDEA at work. I could definitely get by writing a small web app without their "enterprise" Java support -- it doesn't help that much in my application -- but leaving out HTML, JS and CSS syntax highlighting would just be annoying. In response to Eclipse users who haven't tried IDEA, I'd recommend trying it out now that you can do so for free. I used Eclipse for a couple of years prior to getting an IDEA license, and find the IDEA editing and browsing experience to be overall slightly better than Eclipse.
- jomohke 17y agoYeah, IDEA's javascript/html/css support is one of the reasons I switched from eclipse. The Javascript editor in particular is much improved over eclipse: Autocompletion, rename refactoring and find usages actually work somewhat!
- mdemare 17y agoI used to love IntelliJ IDEA - it was the one thing that made coding in Java fun. I even used it for a year after switching to Ruby - despite its complete lack of support for Ruby. But I'm trying it now, and I can't say I'm impressed. There's a forest of plugins, the preference pane is bewildering, it doesn't look as slick as it used to, Mac keybinding don't work, and it's extremely slow. I'd like to say, hey, what happened to doing one thing (editing Java) and doing it well? But, well, were talking about an IDE here. I guess that's just not in the cards. Even so, I'd love an editor with realtime code analysis and those fantastic "suggested actions" for dubious code, without all the cruft associated with version control, html/css, javascript debuggers, database viewers, and so on...
- romanm 17y agoGreat news , this IDE is really state of the art but not turned to be a successful business, It was too close to the developers community and that is why Eclipse took over, it simply has more developers to write all kind of extensions and learn the core of the tool. I believe this open source decision will revive that company.
- smharris65 17y agoWithout support for Javascript, CSS, and HTML I don't see how this can be useful.
- cema 17y agoIt is useful but crippled, as others said in the comments.
- topbanana 17y agoOpen source, huh. Will they be accepting patches?