JavaGeek.org - IDE category

Switching to IDEA, another tale

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:11:00 GMT

And since we're talking about switching stuff, another thing that I recently changed is the IDE I'm using on a day by day basis. I have been a long time Eclipse user, and I still think it is a great IDE, specially for the price (you can't beat free, can you?). It is stable enough, works on different platforms (although the Linux version has always been less stable than the others, in my opinion) and provides you with a very complete platform to develop enterprise, web, desktop and mobile applications.

But I've always heard people talk wonders about IntelliJ IDEA. In fact, if you ask the resident bot at freenode's ##java IRC channel about "IDEA FAQ", the response will be "Yes, IDEA can do that.". I had already tried IDEA back when it was at version 5 or 6, and I found it too different to Eclipse at the time, and since I was in the middle of a project in which the whole team used Eclipse, I didn't had the time or wanted to go into the effort of switching. But now I'm in a different team, and many of my co-workers there use IDEA (some use Eclipse too), so I thought this was the best time to try it out again, since I'd always have people to rely on for questions. That's always a good idea when trying something new, you know. It's like learning how to drive, it's better to have an instructor.

So, after the initial shock I must say I'm pretty impressed with the tool. It is definitely a different experience from Eclipse, in that I think IDEA puts much more emphasis on the editor window. Eclipse seems to be more focused on the perspectives, while IDEA concentrates on having the editors always there. And coding is all about editors, isn't it?

So far, the best feature I like about IDEA is their inspection profiles. It is basically a set of rules that you can enable/disable and configure so that they provide you with hints about things that you are doing wrong.

For example, I like to surround all my debug() and trace() statements with an if() to check if the log level is enabled. IDEA comes with a "Logging Issues" inspection for "Log statements not guarded by log condition" to mark instances that don't follow this rule. And not only that, you can configure the "severity" of the issue (do you want it to be marked as a warning or an error? I have it as error). And, if you happen to use a different logging mechanism than java.util.Logging (like we do, since we're using slf4j), you can configure the Logger class and log conditions that need to be present. And this is only one small issue among the many that are available to IDEA, and there are always plugins that add inspections for other stuff (like javadoc compliance, wicket stuff, etc). This is the feature that so far has sold me on using IDEA (besides the focus on editing). I still have to try doing remote debugging on it, but I hear it works fine.

I think Netbeans has something similar to IDEA's inspections, but I can only handle one IDE switch per month.

Why I dislike Websphere

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 14:51:48 GMT

At work, I've been working on a project that uses Websphere Application Server (WAS) 5.1. Part of the development setup is to use Websphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) 5.1, because it is tightly integrated with WAS.

One of the problems this represents is that WSAD 5.1 is based on Eclipse 2.1.3. After working with Eclipse 3.x for so long, I find it really hard to use an older version, that doesn't provide many of the features I've come to expect, like showing a list of defined keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-Shift-L), or getting the latest plug-in for subversion (Subclipse).

Another problem is that Websphere uses its own JVM, made by IBM, which although it's supposed to be 100% compatible, I still think there are some 'hidden features'. And I've never seen eclipse (or other java programs running with Sun's JVM) give me this kind of error:

There's no stack trace, no reason given. It's almost as bad as a Microsoft product.

MyEclipse 4.0 is out...

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 14:42:30 GMT

Finally, after using 4.0M2 for a while, I am upgrading to the GA (General Availability) version of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench. Among the new features that comes with this release, I'm most interested in their UML Perspective, their JSF support and the new Visual Web Designer. You can check all the new features here.

For only $31.75/year, I really think it is a great bargain for the features that Eclipse needs for web development.

Oh, and I don't have any relation to Genuitec, the company behind MyEclipse.