Where Are The Wise Men?

Eclipse has been making me mad lately. Too many little things take too long, things aren’t working quite the way I think they should. And Eclipse is a beast to configure to do the way I want it to work.

I’ve heard good things about NetBeans and I downloaded the latest, but it seemed that JDK 1.5.004 (which is our standard) is too old — NetBeans needs at least 1.5.006 and refused to install. Okay, next!

I’ve even heard better things about IntellijIDEA (which should I call it for short? I’ve been calling it Intellij . .. ). And it should be pretty good — it now costs $200! But you get a 30 trial. After some poking around, I discovered that participants of No Fluff are getting a 1-year license. Okay, maybe I should try it out.

The install was a piece of cake. Importing a project was even easier. You can import an Eclipse project, so then Intellij uses Eclipse’s .classpath and .project files for it’s project. You can even point it a Subversion repository and Intellij will try to figure out what is dependent on what. And it did a dang good job of it too. Importing projects in Eclipse, however, have always been a big pain for me.

Speaking of Subversion, Intellij has built-in Subversion support. Okay, it’s really a plugin but that plugin comes by default. And it’s much better than any of Eclipse’s plugins. For example, you can look at the changes in the repository before you do an update — to see how the changes in Subversion effect your uncommitted changes.

So after that fact, how does it work? Very well. It’s fast, it’s very, very responsive, and you can configure the crap out of it. I did have some initial trouble with building files and projects, but shutting off my unneeded plugins fixed that. I also installed the JiBx plugin and find that enormously better than what I had to do in Eclipse. The plugin lets you choose your bindings and then has a hook into Intellij’s compile so it automatically instruments the classes after the build. Much better than remembering to run your Bind task in your Ant file before manually running your unit tests. Note all the Emacs bindings work like I think they should (for example, C-x U is not undo in Intellij’s Emacs binding — they keep it at C-M- -).

And there are a bunch of little things. For example, I copied an XML string from my message console into a string in my code editor. I didn’t think anything about it until I ran my unit test, but then I noted that Intellij automatically escaped all the double quotes when I pasted it! How about that?

So Intellij is very good — but is it $200-good? I dunno about that — but I do have a year to figure it out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.