JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog

Sebastiano Pilla wrote a very interesting article about his experiences with the top four IDEs. After testing each one according to his criteria, his pick was IntelliJ IDEA:

“IDEA simply worked without getting in my way with arbitrary limitations. Where it shines is in the editor, the configurability and the speed at which everything operates: in a “shopping list” of features it might lose to the others, but it wins because the implementation and the design feel more consistent to me.”

The lesson is clear. Comparing IDEs by simple feature lists won’t necessarily find you the best IDE. You need to actually try it to be sure it will be right for you. Look for an IDE that boosts your productivity by doing what you expect it to do without getting in the way, i.e. it ‘just works’. A feature list might tell you a feature is there, but it won’t tell you how well it works.

Two interesting polls include IntelliJ IDEA and TeamCity among the tools surveyed for John Ferguson Smart’s upcoming book, Java Power Tools.

In the poll for code quality, IntelliJ IDEA currently has the highest rating, likely due to its powerful and easy-to-use static code analysis features, including over 600 code inspections, built-in code coverage analysis, and dependency analysis.

TeamCity was only recently added to the continuous integration poll, so it’s a bit low on votes at the moment. Originally, the poll had only open source tools, but Smart added some commercial offerings because of the rapidly changing landscape of the continuous integration server market, which I talked about in a recent idea.log post. TeamCity represents a new generation of CI servers due to its attention to the problems of broken-build syndrome, when a broken build causes the whole team’s productivity to drop. TeamCity tackles broken-build syndrome and much more. Are you already doing test-driven development and interested in increasing team productivity? You may want to check out TeamCity.

TheServerSide.com is conducting a survey about which Java IDEs are being used and why. The questions appear to be quite well chosen, rather than just a simple check-box vote for your favourite. We’re looking forward to the results! If you would like to participate, see the survey here.

This weekend JetBrains attended the popular JavaDay conference at Cagliari, Italian island of Sardinia. I had a presentation titled “Productive Java from Start to Finish,” though I didn’t quite get to the ‘finish’ in the 45 minute time limit. I was just getting to the good parts when I saw the time-keeper hold up a sign saying “5 minutes” remaining. Oops! Well, at least I learned a lot, this being my second live presentation so far. (The first one was done too fast, ironically; have to find a happy medium.)

Thanks to Fabrizio Gianneschi (Java User Group Sardegna), who organized the event. Check out the photos here and here. There’s one with me in the middle with Fabricio and Roman Strobl (NetBeans evangelist) on the sunny Saturday afternoon. Did I mention the weather was fantastic, even for Cagliari in November?

There were some interesting presentations (luckily the slides were mostly in English) on ‘agent oriented programming’ with the JADE framework and at least two presentations regarding robotics and Lego Mindstorms, which I think is pretty cool, plus many more topics.

One of the highlights of the event for me was the dinner with Fabricio, Roman, Marco Colombo (Sun, Italy), and Giovanni Marciano (IRRE Piemonte). Incredible seafood, great conversation, and a waiter who sang and played guitar while we waited for our fish (he was busy entertaining us, after all!). Oh yes, and something called Mirto, to cap off the night.

Overall, I think it was a very successful event.