Most IDEs have ignored smarter editing features to help developers with non-enterprise grunt coding. Cunning code completion and refactoring support make IntelliJ's IDEA the exception. IntelliJ's IDEA (also used by in recent development for TheServerSide.com) has been reviewed on SDOnline.

Check out The J Factor: IntelliJ IDEA review.

I have to agree. Being a Visual Cafe user for over 4.5 yrs, I never ever thought I would use another IDE. But then I saw a demo of it and just fell in love. I bought a license after playing with it for a few days and I have never looked back. This is really a programmer's IDE with really great editing features that really save you a lot of time. After using this as my default IDE, I still haven't discovered all of the cool refactoring possibilities.

--Vinny

It's truly the most amazing IDE I've ever used (for any language). It's especially good for people (like me) who suffer from repetitive stress injuries - it does most of the typing for you. All of its intelligence is context and type sensitive. It has to be used to be believed.

The only drawback is it's a complete memory hog. We have a large app and I need about 150MB to run it with decent performance.

This is really a wonderful editor which I ever seen in my 5 years of Java experience. I tried all the big named editors like JBuilder, Visual Cafe, Visual Age etc.. I really got annoyed with somuch of junk code generated by these editors. IntelliJ is more for programmers rather than the GUI builders. Intellij has all the features which is required for a hard core java programmer. I really appriciate its capabilities of code completion, package imports and refractoring. Its really a worth trying editor.

Seen them all. Just one word: the best.

bye
-stephan

This is THE development tool for people who write code.
The best development environment I have used to date.
I hope it stays simple , and not burdened with various unidirectional Wizards. The Ant integration coupled with great XML and JSP editing is all an honest developer needs to churn out any J2EE code and build-scripts. On one of our J2EE projects after trying JBuilder , Forte , Together to generate and edit deployment descriptors , package EAR's and WAR's , do automated builds , migrate to new versions of the app server ,and write code ,we concluded that Ant was the best tool for the job , and there was currently no real alternative to manually working on the descriptors. IDEA + Ant is my current top of the list for either J2EE work or most Java development tasks.

It has no GUI designer ( I like Forte's ) but we do not use designer generated code for production software , only rapid prototyping. Same as when developing MOTIF GUI, I found that once the structure and concepts are clear, I found writing the code generally faster , and the results of higher quality.

Well done IntelliJ.

</Zohar>

Try EJBGEN at: http://www.beust.com/cedric/ejbgen/

I'm a Netbeans user. I tested IDEA after reading the previous comments. It is indeed faster, uses a bit less memory and has neat concepts for editing and especially refactoring. I also found some features lacking: as a server-side programmer, I am not a hard-core HTML guy and Netbeans has a nice HTML tag-completion feature that I did not find in IDEA.
However, there are some things with Netbeans - besides the price difference - that I would not give away, first its openess that allows getting almost weekly goodies and modules from all over the world. The IDEA tool is perfect for corporate environments and the people who make it are worth the money.

As mentioned a lot of things NetBeans offers are not included. More things like that are a very nice localization/properties editor, a database explorer and more like that.

However, I've been using IDEA since the last hour ;-), and it's very very very handy, easy to use, fast(er than netbeans)...

Very nice!!!

Greetings,

I just tried to create a simple GUI application in IDEA 2.0. Look and feel, flexibility, performance (!) of the IDE are very impressive. Functionality described in the documentation also sounds promising. Refactoring is probably very useful thing especially when you have to maintain old project written not by you (unfortunately I did not try it, just read documentation). Very flexible IDE options.

It is really looks cool but as far as right now, if I would think about buying this IDE it will be only because of very good price. I believe 90% of functionality that exists in IDEA 2.0 you can also find in other major IDEs. Of course if you used it for a long time you will learn all shortcuts, tricks, etc. - you will get used to it. But probably, you can say this about most major IDEs.

Best regards,

Taras

You've got to be kidding. I've never seen most of the functionality of IDEA in any other IDE. Auto-imports are SOOO cool. I like the fact that when I cut and paste, it auto-indents to the correct level. When I rename a method, all references to the method are automatically renamed. If I have an intermediate value that I realize should be in a variable, I just Introduce Variable... If I want to change a variable into a property, not only does it create the getters and setters, but it also (optionally) modifies all references to the variable to use the accessors. And on and on...

Greetings, Christopher,

I think that examples that you gave mostly related to the Refactoring functionality that exists in IDEA 2.0. I have not seen refactoring in JBuilder or Visual Cafe, so things like renaming method and IDE will change automatically all references to that method probably does not exist there. This particular situation is not happening very often and actually it can be done via global replace (of course until certain limits). Creating sets and gets for a property exists in JBuilder and Visual Age for Java. Adding import statement to the source code exists but in different view - when you use wizards it will add all required import statements for you. I agree that adding imports while you are typing code is cool functionality, but what can I say: different IDEs have different set of functionality and there is always something that exists only in one IDE.

Best Regards,

Taras

The recently released version 6 of JBuilder has support for
some refactorings (renaming/moving classes and methods),
and also for auto-generating import statements.
But, unfortunately, not in the "Personal" edition.

Check it at http://www.borland.com/jbuilder/jb6/feamatrix.

Regards,

  Rogerio

And if you combine JBuilder 6 with Productivity! from softamis (www.softamis.com), there is even less reason for using anything else - JBuilder does it ALL.

I agree. There are so many open tool extensions for JBuilder , and version 6 has many new features that developers have been asking for that i see no reason to switch. JBuilder does what I need!

I have been a user of JBuilder for several years (and I have contributed a few opentools), and it took about a day of using IDEA to realize how superior it is. There is an arrogance that the JBuilder team has deservedly cultured over the past few years. Of all the IDEs, IntelliJ's product blows the doors off JBuilder in many areas.

JBuilder still has the AppServer integration, along with the great GUI builder. But, as my development needs begin to change, I find all of the wizards and other gimics tiresome. I need an editor first and foremost and IDEA comes through for me like no other tool.

I don't use Swing as much as I used to. I use Ant almost exclusively...you almost *have to* for any project of consequence. And I develop to jBoss even though I deploy to Borland. So, JBuilder works against me most of the time.

I haven't debugged with IDEA yet, and I hope it is capable in that area. And I also hope that JBuilder notices that there is a new kid on the block and they are doing some things better than they are.

-jim

So I have been using Intellj's product "IDEA 2.0.3" for the last couple of days. I have to agree with the feelings on this thread -- this is a great editor. I have also been becoming acquainted with JBuilder in the last couple of weeks ( my previous experience with a Borland product was C-Builder 4, that was a great product too ).
I must say that the IDEA product is more intuitive than JBuilder. I must also point out that I am NOT reading the instructions of usage for either product -- the most preparation I do is by looking at the Tips Of The Day section. Although some may argue that by not reading the user's guide I am not giving JBuilder a fair shot, I am simply pointing out that it gives me a better idea of the natural user-friendliness the two products.
IDEA also has a simpler configuration requirement --- in this case, simpler is better. For example, if you do not set up the correct JAR files to run your project, IDEA essentially walks you through the process so that you can quickly compile. JBuilder notifies the user as well, but does not offer any "quick windows" into the configuration process -- with JBuilder, more effort has to be made in order to add the JARs. Although it's not an overwhelming effort, I simply want to point out the differences of clicking the "Run" button on both products.
Have not run the debugger on IDEA yet. I found the debugger on JBuilder to be really good, if not overly verbose, so let's see if IDEA can hold up to this challenge.

nick,

you should switch for the sake of switching. if the new ide does not do what you want, what have you lost? several hours? you do this for everything, and you'll run into many better ways to get things done, imho.

csb

No offense, if you do not feel the need to refactor your code, then I don't think you are writing good, clean code.

I am finding refactoring capabilities of IDEA indispensable.
There were many times in the past (before I started using IDEA0 that I wanted to rename or move something around, and the pain of manually renaming all that stuff almost always stopped me, with a significant detriment to the code clarity and maintainability.

"Refactor early, refactor often"

-- Jacek

Once has to pay me quite good to use monster IDE's such as Visual Age, etc. The garbage code that they add to mine, is really quite offensive. Besides, the resouces demanded just don't fit well with my 320MB RAM Thinkpad X20 laptop that I use for dev.

But IntelliJ IDEA is going to dethrown UltraEdit in no time. It is a very exciting IDE and others must yet see the light.

I want to believe that in the future, IntelliJ will provide other useful features, such as FTP editing, more JSP support, and code layout for JSP/HTML/XML. As a server side develper, that will be greatly appreciated.

Congratullations IntelliJ, you've had a really great IDEA!

I've been using it for the past 6 months and it is my favourite IDE.

The refactoring support is excellent. And there are lots of cool features like "find usages" of classes/methods.

My thanks to the IntelliJ team. Can't wait till the next version.

This is definately the best Java IDE I have ever seen, by a long shot.
Many of the great things about it are things you won't see in the docs. You just have to use it for a while to learn them. So my advice for anyone who havn't tried it yet is to download it now. It's free :)

Gal

Alright, after much tauting by Floyd, I finally decide to give IDEA a spin to see what the big hoopla is all about. Unfortunately, I can't get the darn CVS integration to work! What the heck do I put in the "CVS client path:" field of Project Properties->CVS->General? It seems to want a directory, because there's a directory browser button next tot he field, but when I set it to the directory I want my files checked out to (from a remote repository), I get the error message "The path c:\bla\bla is a directory. Please specify a correct path in ..."??

I must say, NetBean's CVS Integration Wizard was MUCH easier to use; it took me 10 seconds to set up CVS!

IDEA accepts the following with no complaints (on my machine):

Path to CVS Client:
D:\cvs1-11\cvs.exe

I think it just wants the path to the CVS client executable.
Could you try it again and see if it works?

Personally I think that the IDEA settings are easier to use than NetBeans wizard but that could depend on my general aversion against wizards. I haven't actually tried out the CVS support in IDEA properly since we use VSS at work. VSS works like a charm though.

Ah, THAT path! Ok, got it working now; thanks Fredrik! "CVS Client Path" just isn't that intuitive! How about "cvs bin directory"!

Gene

As many others have stated, this is a programmers IDE. If you are a drag and drop code monkey, keep going. If you are a real programmer that writes all kinds of java programs and needs a real IDE/Editor, then IntelliJ IDEA. This is the most powerful editor I have ever used for any language. The features are to deep to go into here. Download and give it a try. The price is a little high for the average hobby coder, but for the people that do this for a living, the price is small compared to its features and power. My productivity has gone skyward due to IntelliJ IDEA. I will never buy and upgrade. I will always pay full price for each new version, just to support the company. Keep up the great work and you will have a customer for life.


Hard Core Coder.