Archive for March, 2010

More intelligence for JSF component libraries

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Make sure you try the extended JSF components support in the latest IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.2 EAP. Completion, error highlighting and basic refactorings have been added for RichFaces 3.x (a4j and rich) and standard (html and core) component libraries.

Write us about your favorite JSF library and we’ll add support for it asap.

Groovy stacktrace folding

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

When you look at a typical Groovy stack trace, you usually see something like this:

This is not terribly helpful, since there are only three lines from the actual source code. Everything else refers to Groovy’s internals. From now on, though, reading Groovy stack traces will be much easier:

JBoss jBPM visual designer plugin

Friday, March 5th, 2010

We are glad to announce the first release of JBoss jBPM plugin with:

  • Visual designer for jpdl files with DnD, usages search, rename and inplace editing
  • Completion, navigation, refactorings and highlighting inside jpdl xml editor
  • Links to processes from class files
  • Maven pom.xml editor new features

    Thursday, March 4th, 2010

    Since the latest IntelliJ IDEA  9.0.2 EAP the IDE contains a bit of new Maven-related pom.xml editor features.

    1. Easier Navigation

    • You can navigate to “Dependency usages” from “dependencyManagement” of your parent pom.xml:
      and back:
    • You can navigate through projects tree

    2. Smarter Paths
    ‘Path reference’ notion were added to the editor to enhance the code completion, usages search and rename refactoring of project paths.

    3. More intelligent plugins configuration
    IntelliJ IDEA analyses plugin parameter types and adds smart value editors for plugin configuration tags.

    You feedback is as always highly appreciated.

    Maven Generate actions for pom.xml editor

    Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

    Try the last EAP of IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.2 to test new ‘Generate’ actions for Maven pom.xml editor.  Type “Alt+Insert” to invoke the “Generate…” popup menu and select an action to run.

    IntelliJ IDEA actually runs live template inside to complete the code generation

    Generate action for pom.xml

    Let us know what you think about.

    More intelligence for web.xml editor

    Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

    With IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.2 you can enjoy editing web.xml with the new initial parameters support. IntelliJ IDEA now collects parameter names and is also aware of parameter values types. This allows the IDE to generate (with Alt-Insert), complete, highlight and validate them appropriately.

    web.xml context-param completion

    Grab the latest EAP of IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.2 to try it today.

    If you are a plugin writer, you can provide your specific context parameters through the special com.intellij.javaee.model.xml.converters.ContextParamsProvider extention point.

    Zen Coding support in IntelliJ IDEA

    Monday, March 1st, 2010

    With IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.2 you can edit HTML and CSS code really fast using Zen Coding features. To use it, you have to install Zen Coding plugin for Web IDE/IntelliJ IDEA: go to Zen Coding Project Download Page, download an archive that contains a set of live templates, and extract it to “<Your Home Directory>\.IntelliJIdea90\config\templates” folder (”~/Library/Preferences/IntelliJIDEA90/templates” for Mac OS X).

    • Zen Coding plugin involves more than 200 different HTML and CSS live templates. To see all of them, just open Settings (Ctrl+Alt+S), Live Templates, Zen Coding group.
    • Native Zen Coding support allows you to generate HTML structures using complex templates. For example, try to type “form.form-comment#comment>fieldset” in an HTML file and then press TAB. In this case, “form” and “fieldset are live templates but you can use simple tag names instead.
    • You can generate not only HTML but also XML structures. Basic features perfectly work for XML.
    • “TAG.CLASS” and “TAG#ID” templates allow you to specify class and id of HTML elements, but you can specify a value of any XML/HTML attribute, i.e. you can write “person[name=Jack]“.
    • You can use your own live templates as parts of complex templates. For example, suppose you have a template “entry” with the following template text: To generate a list of entries, you just need to type “entry-list>entry[number=$]*5″ and press TAB. By default, the “number” attribute will be generated before “type”. If you want to customize the position where it’s generated, add ATTRS variable to your template – for example: ATTRS variable must have empty string as a default value and should be skipped:
    • Of course, you can disable Zen Coding support if you don’t need it (see Settings (Ctrl+Alt+S), XML Zen Coding).

    To learn more about Zen Coding features, you can watch screencasts on Zen Coding project home page. Note that Zen Coding native support is a part of IDEA Community Edition, and its source code is freely available.

    Database Access Improved

    Monday, March 1st, 2010

    The latest IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.2 EAP contains a big number of Database-related functionality changes:

    • Database Console now has its own toolwindow
    • New console-like UI that keeps input and output in one place and retains the highlighting for execution history
    • Keyboard shortcuts for all Console actions are now configurable
    • Per-result Page Up, Page Down and Refresh actions
    • Complete support for In-Memory Databases (try running some DDL in Console then click Refresh Tables and all the tables will be loaded in the Data Sources tree)
    • Improved support for heavy JDBC drivers that use native libraries to run
    • The notion of Database Connection allows IntelliJ IDEA to do some cool stuff such as Quick Table Contents Lookup integrated with Quick Documentation Lookup (Ctrl+Q)

    The Hibernate Console has also been improved accordingly (separate toolwindow, console-like UI and per-result paging actions).

    Try all this in the latest EAP and let us know what you think.

    UPD: In the next EAP SQL scripts can be run directly from Project View or Editor via Run SQL Script (Ctrl+Shift+F10).

    Drag’n'Drop in Database Diagram

    Monday, March 1st, 2010

    Since IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.2 Database Diagram supports drag-and-drop for adding more tables to the view. The screenshot below shows the way to access the diagram if you somehow missed the What’s New in 9.0 page.

    You can try this right now in the latest EAP.