IntelliJ IDEA 13 Brings a Full Bag of Goodies to Android Developers

http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2013/12/intellij-idea-13-brings-a-full-bag-of-goodies-to-android-developers/

by rdemmer • 13 years ago

147 101 13 years ago

blog.jetbrains.com

zidar• 13 years ago

I am confused about how the IntelliJ IDEA with android plugins competes with Android Studio. I thought that Android Studio is suppose to replace IntellyJ for android development.

RyanZAG2• 13 years ago

Android Studio is a fork of the OSS IDEA by Google. IntelliJ IDEA is the version released by the actual company and is not affiliated with Google.

rdemmer4• 13 years ago

IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio FAQ: http://bit.ly/1d7U0Kg

Q: Is Android Studio a fork of IntelliJ IDEA?

A: No. Android Studio and the Android plugin for IntelliJ IDEA are built from the same code, and all of the changes in Android Studio are, and will continue to be, available in IntelliJ IDEA releases.

67726e• 13 years ago

Android Studio is built off of the codebase[0] from IntelliJ 13. The JetBrains products like RubyMine, WebStorm, and seem to be built off of the same core IDE with plugins for languages/platforms and features. So most of the functionality is really just in plugins, and of course IntelliJ probably offers additional Android development functionality for a price.

[0] http://www.jetbrains.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=983211

rdemmer4• 13 years ago

These resources might help:

IntelliJ IDEA is the base for Android Studio, the new IDE for Android developers: http://bit.ly/1jN1bgb

IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio FAQ: http://bit.ly/1d7U0Kg

whizzkid2• 13 years ago

I wish, they would have a free and lightweight version of the IDEA, so i could use it instead of Sublime Text.

computer• 13 years ago

You mean the open-source community edition that actually exists?

whizzkid2• 13 years ago

Not really actually. With the free community edition, you only get to manage "java" which doesn't work for me since i work with different programming languages with lots of front-end stuff as well. I meant to use it from editing xml, css, html to configure tomcat settings for example. On the other hand, i totally understand that they want people to buy it for fully featured version.

tonyskn• 13 years ago

IDEA Community Edition is free and perfectly usable

octix3• 13 years ago

For what? Java SE? What else?

camus2• 13 years ago

I hear you, IDEA is awesome but quite heavy, most IDEs are today as they are built on languages that run on vms. I tend to have one heavy IDE and a lightweight text editor opened at the same time. That's the best solution.

btipling• 13 years ago

Version 13 is very awesome. We've been finishing our intellij plugin and are so close to having it be usable that it could be user ready in like 2 days which will be awesome because then I can spend more time using the new intellij. I'm also glad they fixed the git colors in the Darkula theme.

Omnipresent3• 13 years ago

Other than "multi device preview" I think Android studio has all the features that IDEA13 offers for android developers. IntelliJ is great and I do all my Java/Groovy based development from it, but I'm not sure about buying the license just to go upgrade to 13

krschultz• 13 years ago

The Sqlite debugger is also IDEA13 only I believe.

biafra• 13 years ago

Isn't that the thing that requires the Ultimate Edition? That's why it is not in Android Studio.

yareally2• 13 years ago

Android Studio is basically the community edition of Intellij, but I would consider it to be more stable.

coldtea2• 13 years ago

Want to like IDEA, but using a Java (Swing) based UI, in both Mac and Windows, makes me always feel like when someones scraps a blackboard with his nails.

I could live with Eclipse though, despite SWT being also quite removed from the native experience. At least it had bloody native text boxes and scrollbars and such.

Omnipresent3• 13 years ago

I had that feeling using eclipse and netbeans for years before switching over to IntelliJ.

RivieraKid3• 13 years ago

What OS do you use? Because Swing is especially shitty on Linux, so I simply can't switch.

afsina• 13 years ago

Trust me it has less issues than SWT. Such as https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=13819

jebblue4• 13 years ago

The global menu was a bad move on the part of Canonical in Ubuntu's Unity desktop. I don't even use it or that ridiculous scroll bar. I keep those packages removed on my systems so my Unity experience is closer to Gnome and Eclipse and other GUIs that had issues with those UI elements also fair much better.

Either way, that has to do more with issues in Unity than in SWT. What SWT accomplished is amazing:

http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

ohwp• 13 years ago

I think this answer could help you: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/24231

switch007• 13 years ago

Java also hates Xmonad (I spent ~30 mins trying workarounds and then gave up, as each time it went wrong, I had to restart my session)

easytiger• 13 years ago

what was the issue, are you using openjdk or sun/oracle jdk?

anglebracket• 13 years ago

I haven't messed with my xmonad.hs in a long time, but adding

  setWMName "LG3D"

to my startupHook fixed most of the issues for me.

draven• 13 years ago

Another thing worth a try: export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1

Worked for me last time I checked (Arch, xmonad 0.11-7, openjdk 7.u45_2.4.3-1, intellij-idea-community-edition 13-1)

sharprazor2• 13 years ago

As someone who has used Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ for years I can say that without a shadow of a doubt that IntelliJ is far ahead of the other two.

The only areas where Netbeans is ahead is built in tools for profiling tools and heap dump analysis, and wizard for visually creating a GUI. I can't think of a single area where Eclipse is better except perhaps number (but not quality) of plugins.

rsynnott• 13 years ago

Netbeans' profiling stuff is separately available as VisualVM, and has decent plugin integration with IntelliJ.

jebblue4• 13 years ago

> As someone who has used Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ for years I can say that without a shadow of a doubt that IntelliJ is far ahead of the other two.

Wow it's like different universes. In mine, Eclipse and even NetBeans are far ahead of IntelliJ. The Eclipse maintenance staff has a bit of a cocky attitude but Eclipse is rock solid, mostly. At least, I can forgive its warts.

bestdayever2• 13 years ago

How is this useless comment at the top?

coldtea2• 13 years ago

It got there by expressing a common sentiment.

Now, what business does your content-less (and insulting to top) comment has on the thread at all?

laureny• 13 years ago

I could live with Eclipse though, despite SWT being also quite removed from the native experience.

How can SWT be removed from the native experience when it uses native widgets everywhere, as opposed to Swing, which reimplements them all in Java (the reason why Swing apps are so ugly and feel so non native)?

RivieraKid3• 13 years ago

That's exactly the reason why I've always returned back to Eclipse. I just hate Swing. It's slow and ugly on Linux.

pron• 13 years ago

NetBeans is Swing, too, and looks quite beautiful and native.

sigzero• 13 years ago

I use it in both environments and have no issues with the L&F.

rdemmer4• 13 years ago

You might find some tips in here: http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-57233

bakerba• 13 years ago

Does the Android Studio canary build get new features before IntelliJ?

hallucinating• 13 years ago

I just recently started doing some Java development (despite vowing never to again), and one of the reasons I'm kinda cool with it is Intellij. Intellij makes it way easier. Things just work (subversion, Spring, hot swap).

jebblue4• 13 years ago

> Things just work (subversion, Spring, hot swap).

The same has been true for me in Eclipse for over 8 years.

vonmoltke• 13 years ago

Two things that do not "just work" first drove me away from Eclipse:

a) git integration. Egit is bad and barely functional. I ended up abandoning it and doing all my git interaction at the command line. I rarely need the git command line with IDEA. b) Maven integration. We use a custom Maven setup that I could never get Eclipse to work properly with; it insisted on using a stock setup that could not build our projects. IDEA's Maven support just works; I run the Maven goal from the sidebar and it runs in IDEA just like I typed "mvn <rule>" at the command line.

I still use Eclipse for C and C++ development, but I will probably abandon it for even that soon. I have just never been able to get into Code::Blocks.

matwood• 13 years ago

Every time I try to use Eclipse I give up in a rage of frustration and go back to Intellij. I have always found Eclipse slower and buggier than Intellij. I'm sure a lot of it is the devil you know.

Chico75• 13 years ago

Is the gradle support really better than in IDEA Community Edition?

Sure I can open the gradle.build file and edit it with syntax colorization but there is no smart auto-completion: you always see a giant list of objects, and not all of them are available.

justafucker• 13 years ago

The Gradle support is a part of Community Edition. Code completion should be available for dependencies and plugins (available in the Maven central). I've seen a few cases when there were no completion for the artifacts from the local Android repository. It will be fixed shortly.

swanson3• 13 years ago

The only feature that really excites me is the Gradle support. Things like the 9patch editor seem horribly misplaced (you probably don't want your devs to be editing those...) and others seem so situational (the autocompleting sdk version - a one line config value that you set once per project).

Android Studio is not really usable as an IDE if you want to have a fully featured test suite because of the weird, half-implemented Gradle "auto-sync" magic (http://www.sep.com/sep-blog/2013/10/17/android-studio-not-re...). Until then, it's still good ole' reliable Eclipse (I can't believe I just said that). Until a different IDE can support Robolectric and Robotium/Instrumentation tests in the same projct that can be run/debugged inside the tool and report results in a window (command line and html test reports don't count, sorry), I won't be switching.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

Weird, I know we have Robotium and Robolectric working fine in Android Studio at work. Although some versions do require a separate project, most versions are just sub-projects under a main folder with a shared build.gradle now. Not than any of us want to use it. You are just forced to if you want to use the latest features like AARs with Gradle. Eclipse is unfortunately obsolete and incapable of handling the latest stuff, even though we all used it for years and prefer it.

swanson3• 13 years ago

Last I checked (October) I could not get the build.gradle to play nicely. Most of the other material online involved using instrumentCompile to trick Android Studio into running your unit tests and a custom runner/plugin: https://github.com/JakeWharton/gradle-android-test-plugin

If you have gotten it working in Android Studio, I'd be very keen to see how (if you are willing to share).

bestdayever2• 13 years ago

Like maybe idea 13? That's how we do it at least.

swanson3• 13 years ago

If IDEA 13 supports that, then great! Would love to see a blog post describing your setup.

fredgrott• 13 years ago

You probably know this already..if you hack up the build.gradle file you can get full android gradle builds in Eclipse, even testing and yes both ways..using regular android TDD with new espresso and Robolectric/Robotium.

Yeah some blog posts are coming soon

paperwork• 13 years ago

I'm curious to know what you like about gradle.

A few months ago I had a chance to work with gradle and it looked to me like it was a step away from declarative project descriptions, back to writing loops to iterate through files, etc. Possibly I was using it wrong, but I've heard great things about it and perhaps my expectations were just too high.

zmmmmm2• 13 years ago

a step away from declarative project descriptions

Exactly why I like it. The delusion that build scripts are 100% declarative is one of those things that makes me hate tools like Ant etc. with a passion.

Parts of build scripts can be declarative, but the ability to break out and put imperative logic in some section where you need it is crucial. And the nice thing about Groovy (which Gradle is based on) is that you can usually do it in a very declarative way (eg: files*.delete() rather than looping, etc.)

barbs• 13 years ago

Things like the 9patch editor seem horribly misplaced (you probably don't want your devs to be editing those...)

Um, what? I can think of plenty of times when I've needed to edit 9patches myself. Mind you, most of those times were when I was working in a startup, and we didn't have a dedicated UI/UX person, but this feature would still be incredibly handy.

rogerthis• 13 years ago

The XML code formatter (shilf+alt+L) is very strange. Maybe bugged. Eclipse does a better work.

E.g. http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-103320

xinkr• 13 years ago

Does anyone know a good software to create these kind of "screenshot gif"? I know my question is not directly related to the content of the article..

larve• 13 years ago

LiceCap is a great tool, and opensource: http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

boobsbr• 13 years ago

What a terrible name for a project.

levosmetalo• 13 years ago

After trying to use Android Studio with its Gradle integration behind a company firewall that requires all outside network access through the proxy, I just gave up and went back to Eclipse, where everything just works. Diving through different configuration options was just to painful to put up with.

fridek• 13 years ago

Personally I think "doesn't work like Eclipse" is a good thing. If you don't mind trying again go to http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/documentation/migration_faq.ht... first. You will also find CTRL+SHIFT+A combo useful - it's a fast search of settings/actions.

Properly set IntelliJ will boost your productivity many times. It's just an investment if you migrate from other IDE. I like to think about it as something similar to migration from crappy unit testing solution to a better one - it just pays off after some time.

eranation• 13 years ago

Has anyone tried using Kotlin for Android development? (it's supposed to be lower runtime footprint than Scala, and it is officially supported by Jetbrains [1])

[1] http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2013/08/working-with-kotlin...

ajselvig• 13 years ago

Kotlin works well for Android development. The annotations have gotten better recently, too, so you can interact with Android classes without too many null checks.

jareds• 13 years ago

I really hope the Gradle support is ported to Eclipse and that the Eclipse Android tools are actively maintained. I tried Android Studio but it’s completely inaccessible with my screen reading software. Since it is based off IDEA I assume I would run into the same problem trying to use the new version so haven’t bothered.

dkhenry4• 13 years ago

I really want to like Intellij since it is so much more responsive then Eclipse, but I can't for the life of me get a working scala set up in IDEA or in the community version. Eclipse might still be a bit of a sloutch, but it works.

TelmoMenezes• 13 years ago

In my experience the problem is usually sbt related. I found IntelliJ to work great with scala+Maven.

dsaber2• 13 years ago

What issues are you facing exactly? I've been successfully developing Scala apps since IntelliJ 12 with no issues. It's leaps and bounds better than Eclipse. One thing to note that for sbt-based projects, I recommend generating the IntelliJ project from https://github.com/mpeltonen/sbt-idea

dkhenry4• 13 years ago

Getting it to work with SBT. Even generating the project with sbt idea I still can't get it to compile correctly. And I still haven't been able to get it attach a debugger.

I think the current issue is with SBT 0.13 which isn't supported by them right now.

octix3• 13 years ago

The more comments about IntelliJ IDEA I read, the more it reminds me of apple fans... It's just a tool and not a miracle! But hey, everyone is special and has the right to opinion, right? :)

tlarkworthy• 13 years ago

coding is our jobs. The IDE is our primary interface. Of course its important. Its much more of a vital decision than what looks good (apple fans), its about what gets the most real work done.

Look at vim Vs. emacs for a better analogy.

octix3• 13 years ago

What are you talking about? I use IDE everyday and I'm not questioning the importance of IDEs, i'm questioning the fan base :)

All I'm saying is that the whole "it's worth paying extra", "it's so much better and productive", "it has so many features"... is just bs... IMHO. Use right tool for the job and be open minded, that's all. If I have to switch to go lang tomorrow, should I start complain, whine and wait for IDEA for go or just do whatever I have to do?

And you cannot compare vim vs. emacs anology with this one, since hey both are free and open source, however IDEA is just a good commercial product, but not a silver bullet, that's all.

Karunamon• 13 years ago

Its much more of a vital decision than what looks good (apple fans), its about what gets the most real work done.

Jeez, talk about responding to a fallacy with a fallacy...

omarkatzen• 13 years ago

I'd like to try an IDE, since I usually end up using vim due to the fact that my projects often mix languages (Python, C, Clojure, occasionally Scala). How do Intellij, LightTable, SublimeText, etc. perform on those sorts of polyglot projects?

trollingineer• 13 years ago

Thank God for IntelliJ because Eclipse is the biggest steaming pile of shit excuse for an IDE.

I'm really glad Google is ditching Eclipse as the go-to IDE in favor of the IntelliJ-based Android Studio. Good riddance.

IntelliJ IDEA 13 Brings a Full Bag of Goodies to Android Developers

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