Hello,

In my work, I still spend much of my time doing development.

A lot of people now uses Eclipse but in all companies I work in, I asked them to buy me IDEA. Most of the time, they don’t want to buy it, mostly because they find stupid using any other thing than the free Eclipse.
It’s quite hard to persuade people about the many little things that are better in IDEA than in Eclipse.

Now, as release 8.0 is out, I will use it for 30 days (the free evaluation time) for Appliweb development. Each time I will see some great (or small) features I like, I’m going to tell you about it, I hope this will help you understand it’s usefullness.

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I use maven for all my java projects, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that we can create directly a Maven project using IDEA, It will create it’s directories and project files  Even better, you can choose archetypes ! (archetypes are template projects for maven):

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For the development of the GUI editor of Appliweb, I need to write HTML, CSS and javascript. IDEA is primary a Java source code editor, but I found nice little things for web editing.

Like the underlined link to a missing file. Nice to fix for typos.

The XHTML parser understand it’s a link to a file, and the file is missing from the project !

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Even better, it can suggest to create the file:

Only using Alt+Enter keys, it will suggest and create the file for you !

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Editing a CSS file, while adding a color to a CSS rule, I see that IDEA displays a little square at the left showing you what color it is:

Once again, a really small little thing  very pleasant to see….