IntelliJ IDEA goes open source

http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2009/10/intellij-idea-open-sourced/

by Hates_ • 17 years ago

120 75 17 years ago

blogs.jetbrains.com

stevoski• 17 years ago

Astonishing 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• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

I'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.

ilyak7• 17 years ago

So 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.

brianm• 17 years ago

Sadly, 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• 17 years ago

So is it crippled or is it a bad business move because it's not crippled enough?

ComputerGuru• 17 years ago

Can't it be both at once?

bokchoi• 17 years ago

It 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_compariso...

amichail• 17 years ago

Google App Engine is not supported in the free version.

jollojou• 17 years ago

The 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.

jz• 17 years ago

From the comparison matrix it appears to be missing quite a bit. Since it is open source though, I don't see a reason why someone can't develop the missing feature(s) that they need. Then again you have to value your time at something. Buying a license may be cheaper in the long run.

jongraehl• 17 years ago

It does everything I want now (for Scala). If their product is good enough (compared to Eclipse, Netbeans, and Emacs) then if I later decide I want the extra features, there's a chance I'll pay them.

kaffeinecoma6• 17 years ago

Site 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.)

whirlycott13• 17 years ago

What 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• 17 years ago

If 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.'

kaffeinecoma6• 17 years ago

I 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.

bdj• 17 years ago

Intellij has a few features that I would have a hard time living without. Code inspection is probably the number one feature that is pretty amazing. You can configure it to check everything from warning about null pointers to unused variables to questionable practices (like an assignment in a conditional). When you have a green light, you can be reasonably sure that the code is clean from most basic problems. The autocomplete is the best I've seen in any IDE, and it allows matches on CamelCase by just typing the capital letters and brings up choices based on type inference. The version control integration is also pretty amazing; I think they could sell the change management and merging portion as a stand alone tool that would do really well on its own. Overall, IntelliJ lets me get into a flow with programming by making a lot of the warts of Java melt away. Sometimes it feels like it's almost writing the code for you and you are just giving it some direction. I know that some of these features have been implemented in Eclipse, but the way they all integrate so seamlessly makes IntelliJ a fun environment to code in. I miss these features in other languages that don't have an advanced IDE.

projectileboy4• 17 years ago

I find it more ergonomic, for lack of a better word. As far as feature-by-feature, it's much the same, although IntelliJ really stands out in some areas; off the top of my head:

- Javascript / HTML / CSS support

- Structural search-and-replace (imagine search and replace that actually understands code)

- Code completion and navigation for XML and properties files

...and more.

artsrc• 17 years ago

I can't answer for him, but I can answer for me. IntelliJ has key mappings that just make more sense. IntelliJ is somewhat better at completion and refactoring.

I use Eclipse, because I know that having really learned it, I can use it where ever I want, no matter where I work.

kaffeinecoma6• 17 years ago

IntelliJ IDEA Open Sourced October 15th, 2009 by Egor Malyshev I believe you’ll like this announcement — IntelliJ IDEA has just gone open-source! Check out the press release as well as the new jetbrains.org community site for the details. We all will soon get a lot of new friends and colleagues in our IntelliJ IDEA community! Starting with the upcoming version 9.0, IntelliJ IDEA will be offered in two editions: Community Edition and Ultimate Edition. The Community Edition focuses on Java SE technologies, Groovy and Scala development. It’s free of charge and open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. The Ultimate edition with full Java EE technology stack remains our standard commercial offering. See the feature comparison matrix for the differences. Briefly, in the free Community Edition you’ll get all the Java code support — various refactorings and code inspections, coding assistance; debugging, TestNG and JUnit testing; CVS, Subversion and Git support; Ant and Maven build integration; and Groovy and Scala support (through a separate plugin). To learn more and download the Public Preview of IntelliJ IDEA 9 Community Edition, please visit the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition site. The IntelliJ platform, the common foundation for all our IDEs (IDEA, RubyMine, WebIDE or MPS), is being open-sourced under the APL 2.0, too. You’ll find all the relevant information on how to participate and benefit at JetBrains.org. Check out the FAQ if you have additional questions. Tags: community edition, maia, open source

kentosi• 17 years ago

Why on EARTH do people do this for? Is it an automated bot script? I see this kind of replication with "tags" on blogs as well.

Someone please explain.

ilyak7• 17 years ago

Suddently.

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.

Tichy3• 17 years ago

Not 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.

ilyak7• 17 years ago

I've asked on ##java and nobody could tell me how to get visual merging in IDEA. Sad.

jeremychone• 17 years ago

IMO. Too late and not enough. It might stop the erosion, but won't get new developers (IMO)

bdittmer• 17 years ago

Heh, 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.

axod6• 17 years ago

The Java developers I've known who are worth their salt, don't use IDE's :/

scorpioxy• 17 years ago

Whatever 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.

projectileboy4• 17 years ago

This means you now have a free Arc IDE, by the way :-)

strlen• 17 years ago

Just searched for this and found it: 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.

projectileboy4• 17 years ago

Thanks. Send me an e-mail if you run into any issues.

mryall• 17 years ago

The 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• 17 years ago

Yeah, 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• 17 years ago

I 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...

smharris65• 17 years ago

Without support for Javascript, CSS, and HTML I don't see how this can be useful.

cema• 17 years ago

It is useful but crippled, as others said in the comments.

topbanana• 17 years ago

Open source, huh. Will they be accepting patches?

IntelliJ IDEA goes open source

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