JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog

Making a product out of your project is usually a boring and time-consuming task: just think about all those build scripts, Java launchers, and installers. And it often takes more than a week to generate all these, then obfuscate your jars, and of course then comes maintenance.

The good news is that now you can easily generate Ant scripts that will make all these routine tasks for your IntelliJ IDEA project. The new product, BuildDesk, was released recently. Now all you need is to load your IntelliJ IDEA project, and BuildDesk will make a proper compilation and packaging, produce a multiplatform installer with a native launcher and obfuscated jars along with necessary Ant scripts - all in a less than an hour. Further maintenance is fun – what you used to fix for hours now will take minutes.

One more detail that may be interesting for IntelliJ IDEA fans is that all BuildDesk developers are former JetBrains employees that left the company to start their own business. So, you can expect to find the same level of usability and increased productivity in BuildDesk as you used to in IntelliJ IDEA. Just take a look at the BuildDesk demo.

And of course, BuildDesk will become an IntelliJ IDEA companion in the nearest future.



Got intrested? Read more about BuildDesk, look at more screenshots, or download the trial right now.

Starting from release 6.0, IntelliJ IDEA will provide Struts support out-of-the-box. The functionality is added by Struts Assistant plugin that is now bundled to IntelliJ IDEA. So you’ll get it without any additional download and installation. Furthermore, the plugin will be better integrated with IntelliJ IDEA core and will immediately get all J2EE improvements and new features that will be available in the forthcoming IntelliJ IDEA 6.0. The plugin itself will be free and open source, so you can find it in IntelliJ IDEA plugin repository.

The next great news is that Dmitry Avdeev, the Struts Assistant plugin developer, is now hired by JetBrains. He’ll become a member of the J2EE team in IntelliJ IDEA. Welcome aboard, Dmitry!

After IntelliJ IDEA 5.1 release, JetBrains asked what do you need/want from AJAX tool. The discussion first started at Javalobby and then continued at Ajaxian. We thank everyone who participated, since the answers were really interesting and useful.
This time JetBrains starts a new survey together with Ajaxian to get more details about your AJAX needs. The survey contains 12 simple questions and it will not take a long time to answer them. In return, 10 randomly chosen participants will get free IntelliJ IDEA licences. The winners will be announced July, 1st, 2006.
Read more about the survery or go to survey right now.

On March, 15th JetBrains made presentations on Team Server and IntelliJ IDEA at Google. The live video of these two presentations is now available at GoogleVideo.

Here what Alex Tkachman, JetBrains marketing director who also participated at the presentations, says at his blog:

” First talk is done by Dmitry Jemerov and dedicated to our new product Team Server. It is practically the same talk we did on JavaOne. The talk gives very good idea of what we are doing and how we see the ways to improve productivity of development team. It covers continious integration, server-side code analisis, collaboration and extensibility of Team Server. The talk dedicated mainly to the features of version 1.0 of Team Server but I think it gives good feeling where are we going.

The second talk “AJAX with pleasure” done by Mike Aizatsky. It is a bit compressed (because of time constraints) version of Mike’s talk on AJAX Expirience conference. The talk covers HNML/CSS/Javascript related funcionality of IntelliJ IDEA and shows how you can develop AJAX applications with real pleasure.

The whole video is about 1 hour 15 minutes long but I think it is interesting enough to find time to see it.”

“Simple Syntax Highlighting” plugin for generic syntax highlighting was recently developed by one of the IntelliJ IDEA enthusiasts. The plugin uses simple configuration files to add syntax highlighting for such programming languages as Python and, of course, Ruby.
The plugin is free and can be downloaded via IntelliJ IDEA Plugin Manager. You can read more about this plugin at its web site (http://idea-simsyn.tigris.org/) or in IntelliJ IDEA Plugin Repository.
There is already some feedback from plugin users:

• IntelliJ Ruby Syntax Highlighting Plugin from Jay Fields
• Even Better Random Times for Rails from Obie Fernandez where he uses IntelliJ IDEA with the Simple Syntax Highlighting plugin for random date generation

Yet another acknowledgement of IntelliJ IDEA leadership in providing the most intelligent Java IDE - this time from Yakov Fain, Enterprise Editor of Java Developer’s Journal. He states that “…this IDE outsmarts me big time… JetBrains folks did an amazing job”. To read the full story, visit Yakov Fain’s blog.
He also adds that “…If they’ll add a decent Swing GUI designer, this will be the only IDE to use”. Well, we are going to! That’s the one of the planned features for the Release 6.0. If you want to know more about the new GUI designer, just visit Dmitry Jemerov’s blog where Dmitry discusses the new designer’s features.

SQL Query plugin is one of the top-ten downloaded IntelliJ IDEA plugins. It allows executing SQL statements through a JDBC connection right from IntelliJ IDEA. It provides you with a syntax highlighting, allows you to work with multiple open queries, save and load queries, and a lot more.



The plugin also helps you to browse for database structure showing you data types, procedures, functions, tables, foreign keys, primary keys, and indexes.



The plugin is free and available through IntelliJ IDEA Plugin Manager.
To find the full description of the plugin features, either visit the SQL plugin page or see the description of the plugin at IntelliJ IDEA plugin repository.

During the last three months JetBrains created a series of Flash demos. Two of them are “presentation demos” showing the main functionality of IntelliJ IDEA: IntelliJ IDEA Overview and Web and Enterprise Development with IntelliJ IDEA.

Other demos are “tutorials” that demostrate and explain how to use certain IntelliJ IDEA features: i18n support, Creating AJAX Page Counter in 5 Minutes, and GoogleSearch Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA.

We are going to create more. Your comments, suggestions and ideas about new demos are welcome.

Even experienced users do not use the full functionality of their products. Sometimes they do not need it, but more often they simply don’t know about it. Of course there are lots of resources that can help you study the product (tips&tricks, demos, tutorials, etc.) But imagine that the IDE itself can tell you about the functionality you missed.

Well, IntelliJ IDEA can do such a thing (or a kind of it). It has Productivity Guide displaying the most productive IDE features, and statistics on how often you use it.

To open the Productivity Guide dialog , click Help | Productivity Guide.



Each feature has not only statistics info, but also the tip explaining what it is and how to use it. You will be surprised to see how many features you never used.

But it is not necessary to open this dialog every time you want to see what you’ve missed. During lengthy processes (like compilation, startup, etc.), IntelliJ IDEA can inform you about the productivity features that you never use or use too rare, and show corresponding tips.

Note   This tip&trick was originally posted at www.javalobby.org.

I’m happy to announce that I’m going to give a presentation on our new product, JetBrains “Team Server”, at JavaOne 2006 in San Francisco. I’ll describe the major feature areas of Team Server and show how it solves many of the problems of other team development tools.

The presentation, TS-5033, is currently scheduled for Tuesday, May 16th, 3:15pm.

I will be at the conference together with my colleagues, and we’ll be happy to meet with users of our products and discuss any topics related to them.

Looking forward to seeing you soon.

Dmitry Jemerov