Sunday, November 11, 2007

IntelliJ IDEA 7.0

I had a chance to give IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.1 on my Mac. The latest version of IntelliJ has a wonderful set of new features. I really am enamored with its web services development tools. The support for Apache Axis is a wonderful thing. As a Netbeans user, I have issues around using Axis. It is nice to find first class support.

The support for various frameworks is quite impressive too: GWT, Apache Struts (1.2 and 1.3.x), Spring (1.2.9 and 2.0.7), and Hibernate are great.

Alternative language support has also been added for Ruby and Groovy. They also have the best Javascript editor in an IDE have seen.

One of the biggest strong points for IDEA has always been refactoring. The latest version does not disappoint. There have also been a number of improvements to its code analysis tools. They help the novice to experienced programmer to avoid common mistakes.

One of the nice features that I came across which was not mentioned in the marketing glossies and notes are: JAXB code and schema auto generation. The other one was XmlBeans code auto generation from a schema. Very cool!

My chief complaint about IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.1 is the lack of visual development of JSF. The Netbeans IDE has the best visual JSF tools.

The only other complaint is lack of import/project support for Netbeans projects. Eclipse support is available, but I need the Netbeans support.

My overall impression is great. It provides the Java developer with a great IDE with a number of powerful features/tools. It is definitely worth having in your toolbox.

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