With IntelliJ IDEA 8 under development, we just couldn't pass up releasing a Milestone version on 8/8/08! This Milestone Release keeps up with the ever-growing demand for technologies, frameworks and languages support while broadening the possibilities for developing rich, complex solutions that adapt to todays fast-paced environment. - JBoss Seam Integration - Javascript/Flex Debugger - Spring 2.5 - FreeMarker, Velocity, GWT 1.5 - Great support for REST WebServices - Struts 2 - Multi-dialect SQL Console - Reworked project configuration - New automated refactorings - Improved coding assistance - Numerous new code inspections - Countless other new features and improvements Check out the fresh release at http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion?ij8m1an

That is a very compelling set of features! Scala (yah!), Python, updates to GWT and Groovy (both of which I am using in a project), Seam, Struts, Spring for more traditional j2ee shops, Flex, REST (and of course GWT) for RIA developers. And finally, support for FreeMarker and Velocity - the secret weapons in the arsenal of many developers! For the minimal price charged it's value proposition is utterly compelling! Fantastic!

That is a very compelling set of features!

Scala (yah!), Python, updates to GWT and Groovy (both of which I am using in a project), Seam, Struts, Spring for more traditional j2ee shops, Flex, REST (and of course GWT) for RIA developers.

And finally, support for FreeMarker and Velocity - the secret weapons in the arsenal of many developers!

For the minimal price charged it's value proposition is utterly compelling!

Fantastic!

Finally, decent Python support! I have been forced to use PyDev on Eclipse whenever I want to do anything for which I'm not immediately sure of the APIs by memory. For my Maven/Java/HTML/JavaScript needs, however, IntelliJ's managed to trump my other tools, so I'm excited about narrowing the tool chain by even one more!

wow what a feature sets.. netbeans is not too far behind eclipse sometime p** me off because you have to download and add many modules by yourself and not everything is top notch because of open source nature of the project. I mean some modules are out dated and some are not up to the standard. anyways it is good to have GWT and Flex cover which is major RIA platform..

not everything is top notch because of open source nature of the project.

Huh? How does something being open source imply "not top notch"? Open source implies open to scrutiny whereas closed source doesn't, so should we use that? At the end of the day the quality is down to the people driving a particular software project not to whether it is open source, closed source or whatever.

Woo hoo! I've been waiting a long time for decent freemarker support. The eclipse freemarker plugin(s) are absolutely terrible... I had to stop using them entirely because of fun bugs like typing in ${ would cause the editor to take no more input until re-opened (wtf?). Anyway, I'm pretty optimistic about this feature, can't wait to give it a test run. The threaddump analyzer looks nice also.