JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog

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.

You can inspect and optimize your CSS stylesheets by removing duplicate style attributes.
IntelliJ IDEA validates CSS stylesheet on-the-fly as you open it and highlights duplicate CSS attributes. Description tooltip appears when you move mouse over them.



Click the highlighted attribute to pop up Quick Fix that lets you instantly correct the problem.



Of course that’s not all CSS support that IntelliJ IDEA provides. To learn more, see full description of IntelliJ IDEA’s HTML Editor with CSS Support.

Meet JetBrains at the Ajax Experience 2006, the international event for Ajax community that will take place in May 10-12th at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, California.
“Ajax with pleasure” presentation will be made by Mike Aizatsky, the team leader of the Web and Enterprise Development Department of IntelliJ IDEA. The presentation will demonstrate Web development functionality (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc.) that is already available in the IntelliJ IDEA 5.1. It will also cover features planned for the 6.0 release.
Mike will also make live IntelliJ IDEA demonstrations at the demo table, during the two conference days.
Those who want to know about Ajax support in IntelliJ IDEA right now or don’t have an opportunity to attend, may take a look at the IntelliJ IDEA’s Ajax demo.

A nice Live Template for Swing developers was posted at publicobject.com. The template can save you a lot of time when prototyping Swing code.
If you want to find more live templates examples, take a look at the Defining a Live Template for Null-Check post and its comments.

The default VM options for IntelliJ IDEA may be not optimal when your project contains more than 10000 classes and developers often try to change the default options to minimize IntelliJ IDEA hangtime. But sometimes the changes make things even worse.
So, how to configure IntelliJ IDEA VM options optimally? That’s not so easy question to answer, since the configuration strongly depends on the project being developed.
However, it is a well-known fact that JetBrains “eats its own dog food” and uses IntelliJ IDEA for development of new IntelliJ IDEA versions. Therefore, we can recommend some settings that our developers use and explain the general memory policy.

1. -Xms = 32m (64m)
2. -Xmx = 256m

Please note that very big Xmx and Xms values are not so good. In this case, GarbageCollector has to work with a big part of memory at a time and causes considerable hang-ups. On the other hand, too small values can lead to the OutOfMemory exception. The specified values provide enough memory and at the same time the GarbageCollector works often but rather fast.
One more important thing is to pay attention to the memory indicator at the bottom-right corner of IntelliJ IDEA. If it shows that the memory in use is almost equal to the total memory available (let’s say 195m out of 220m), we recommend you to increase Xmx on 50m or so.

3. -XX:MaxPermSize=92m

This is a default value, and in most cases you don’t need to change it. You may increase it only if you get “OutOfMemoryError” in “PermGen space”.

4. -server

Some people find IntelliJ IDEA more responsive with this option. But it is not guaranteed.

5.   We don’t recommend to use the following options at all, since they are not very stable:
    -XX:+UseParallelGC
    -XX:+UseAdaptiveSizePolicy
    -XX:-UseConcMarkSweepGC