JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog

Maven integration in a Java IDE might not be a surprise for you, but let me show you just one thing, that makes IntelliJ IDEA Maven support prominent and noteworthy.

If you have any Maven project, you do not need to perform routine steps while importing it to IntelliJ IDEA and you do not need to be anxious about dependencies and artifacts in it, nor would you need to worry about technologies used in project. Just open the project as you do with usual IntelliJ IDEA projects, sit back and relax. IntelliJ IDEA will automatically recognize everything.

Here is an example. To open our Maven project, we just go to File | Open Project (Alt + F + O) and specify the path to pom.xml (the Maven project descriptor file).



IntelliJ IDEA creates a project based on the Maven Project descriptor file.
When done, all maven goals can be found in the Maven projects tool window. We can simply run/debug arbitrary Maven goals; execute them before/after make or run/debug, or by invoking an assigned keyboard shortcut. Select any Maven goal in the tree and right-click it to view options.



Now, let’s view our project structure. Go to Settings (Ctrl + Alt + S) | Project Structure and click Modules. As you can see, IntelliJ IDEA recognized modules and web facets. Moreover, all dependencies and deployment settings were detected and stored.



That’s all, nothing but a single click and you can enjoy complete support for Maven builder, including smart coding assistance for editing Maven pom.xml, intelligent code completion, inspections and quick-fixes, refactorings and other IntelliJ IDEA productivity-boosting features, which we are going to cover in the next posts.

We’re glad to announce the availability of IntelliJ IDEA 8.0 first EAP.

Some of the IntelliJ IDEA 8.0 features are now available for the first preview:

• Flex debugger
• Improved Flex code editor, with new inspections
• JavaScript debugger
• JBoss seam support, with coding assistance and dedicated visual tools
• Support for various SQL dialects, with coding assistance and injection
• Numerous other enhancements and new features

Download the fresh build and give a try right now.
For the complete list of the new features and improvements, check Release Notes


Enjoy! And develop with pleasure!

We’re glad to announce the availability of IntelliJ IDEA version 7.0.3
This new release brings multiple new features, improvements and bug-fixes, including

• Improved performance and usability
• Improved Flex support
• Totally new, reworked debugger UI
• Multiple Maven integration improvements
• Numerous bug-fixes, cosmetics and exception fixes

For the complete list of what’s been added and fixed, see Release Notes
Download the fully-functional, 30-day, no-key evaluation version of IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.3

In ancient times, Genova was a place where mighty armies frequently crossed their swords in fierce conflicts to determine who would rule the city and the surrounding area. On 10th March 2008 at the Genova university the mighty armies of Sun, Oracle and JetBrains met in a friendly battle - a battle of Java IDEs. Thanks to careful organization from the JUG Genova people the event went very smoothly and more that 120 attendees checked out all three IDEs (NetBeans, JDeveloper and IntelliJ IDEA) side by side. Events like this one certainly help developers who care about the way they create software, to make qualified decisions about choosing the best IDEs for their projects. I really enjoyed presenting here, the audience was great, as was the whole event . I’d like to thank the organizers for preparing the event and the audience for being so responsive and enthusiastic. As always, in its long history, it’s Genova who won the battle. I’m glad I could participate.

This post is by Vaclav Pech - I’m just the messenger, since he’s now at the IDE Shootout in Rome

If you’re interested, Fabrizio Giudici posted a few good pics of the Genova event here.

Just a quick blog today,

We’ve just received a message from the folks over at JavaOne allowing us to give a $100 discount to anyone who would like to visit the conference this year… We’re quite excited to be attending this year, and look forward to see you all there!

Would anyone be interested in a meetup outside of the conference with the JetBrains development teams?

For the $100 conference discount, go to: http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/index.jsp
And enter the code: ECXH66

This link and code can be passed around as much as you’d like, so feel free to share it with your community

All the best,

Dave Booth

Raise your hats to Ted for his recent IntelliJ IDEA Tips series! Ted sheds light on the wallflower features of IntelliJ IDEA, as well as new ways of using well-known features and the most beneficial plug-ins.

• IntelliJ IDEA Tip: Change Background Color for Read-Only Files
• IntelliJ IDEA Plugin of the Week: Describe Key
• IntelliJ IDEA Tip: Goto Class Coolness
• IntelliJ IDEA Tip: Open All Files in a Changelist
• IntelliJ IDEA Tip: Quick Lists

Stay tuned for new enlightening blogposts from Ted!

Another valuable contribution comes from Cedric Champeau, who has shown how structural search in IntelliJ IDEA can help you find try/catch performance bottlenecks.

If you are looking for ways to speed up IntelliJ IDEA on your computer, some of these 10 Tips to Increase IntelliJ IDEA Performance should prove helpful.

And, last but not least – 9 more reasons to love your IDEA of choice – thanks to Messi.

It is sometimes the case, you can create plugins you want to preserve for internal use only. With
IntelliJ IDEA you can maintain your own enterprise repository to share your plugins with team members solely.

To create a repository, we need a Web server, where our plugins will reside, and a descriptor of available plugins (updatePlugins.xml), so IntelliJ IDEA could find them. This file can be located at the same Web server, for instance. By the time we decide to use plugins from the enterprise repository, we’ll only need to specify where this descriptor resides. To do so, open the Settings dialog (Ctrl + Alt + S) and go to Updates. In the Plugin Hosts section click Add and specify path to the updatePlugins.xml.

When creating updatePlugins.xml file for your repository, follow this DTD:
http://plugins.intellij.net/dtd/idea/updatePlugins1.0.dtd, so IntelliJ IDEA would be able to recognize available plugins.
Each plugin entry in this file should contain plugin identifier and URL of the plugin repository. Additionally, we can specify here plugin version. Though, if it is not pointed out in updatePlugins.xml, IntelliJ IDEA will fish it out from the plugin *.jar.

For example, we upload MyPlugin to the Web server where the repository resides. Then we open the updatePlugins.xml and add new plugin entry, like this one:

<plugins>
<plugin id="MyPlugin" url="http://unit:8080/myPlugin.jar" version="1.0"/>
</plugins>

And that’s all we need to do to add the plugin to our repository.

If the whole team uses customized IntelliJ IDEA, you can add the whole list of plugin hosts to the bin/idea.properties under IntelliJ IDEA installation folder. Just open this file and add the following line: -D idea.plugin.hosts=[URL1],[URL2],…[URLn] where [URL1],[URL2],…[URLn] is a comma-delimited list of the URLs to the enterprise repositories.

Once hosts are specified, plugins are automatically updated according to the schedule defined in the Check for updates field of the Updates dialog. Yet, you can update them manually any time you need it. Just open the Updates dialog and click Check now. Update Info dialog box opens showing the list of plugins from all the available enterprise repositories. You can unselect those of them you don’t want to update for some reason.
Don’t forget that updates will take effect after IntelliJ IDEA restart.