Code Adept » ide

JetBrains Open-Sources IntelliJ IDEA

Jeremy Anderson — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:36:21 +0000

Been awfully quiet lately as I am concentrating on finishing my book (http://manning.com/allmon), but this was some great news that I had to share.

The makers of the best Java IDE have just announced that they are open-sourcing their IntelliJ IDEA product and offering a community edition for free now. You can read about it here (The Most Intelligent Java IDE — Now Free and Open Source).

Tagged: ide, java, open-source

RubyMine, my new favorite Ruby IDE

Jeremy Anderson — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:04:34 +0000

Recently JetBrains decided to build a Ruby specific IDE called RubyMine based on their very awesome IntelliJ IDEA product. They already had a very nice Ruby plugin for IntelliJ which in my opinion was the best Ruby integration for any IDE (sorry NetBeans fanboys), but decided to package a stripped down version of IntelliJ specifically for Ruby. Now don’t get me wrong, when I say stripped down, I definitely don’t mean stripped down in features, because this IDE rocks.

A couple of really nice features that I miss when using fine text editors such as TextMate, are code-completion and SCM integration. I know TextMate has a psuedo code-completion by pressing the Esc key, and that there is a Git bundle for TextMate, but it in no way compares to the elegance of RubyMine. I mean come on, when I’m still trying to learn the API, stuff like the screenshots below really help.

Code completion in RubyMine

The next feature I really miss is the visual Red/Green bar of running unit tests. While the RSpec bundle for TextMate provides a really nice HTML output giving that Red/Green bar experience, when running simple TestUnit tests you don’t get this, and I found that the bundle constantly switched back and forth from RSpec to Ruby and that got a little annoying.

RubyMine's test runner output

The biggest reason I will likely be switching to RubyMine for my Rails projects is that it’s cross platform. While I prefer to do my development in either Mac OSX or Linux, some of the developers on my projects may be more comfortable in Windows. Using RubyMine allows us to develop using a common tool making it easier to pair and help each other out without having to lose productivity due to the context switching from one development environment to another. I can’t wait for the 1.0 release of this product because it will only get better.

RubyMine's generators

Running Rake tasks couldn't be easier

Tagged: ide, jetbrains, rails, Ruby, tools

Microsoft targeting Java developers for Silverlight

Jeremy Anderson — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:17:05 +0000

There was an article on ComputerWorld yesterday titled Microsoft woos developers under the Silverlight. It would appear that Microsoft is now targeting Java developers for their Silverlight RIA platform.

Microsoft is funding a French open-source project to build tools that would enable programmers to use the popular open-source Eclipse framework to write Silverlight applications, said Brian Goldfarb, a director in Microsoft’s developer platform division, in an interview last week. This should also let Eclipse programmers share their Silverlight applications with developers working in Microsoft’s Visual Studio framework, Goldfarb said. The project is being hosted on SourceForge.

So I decided to look into this Eclipse plugin to see what it was all about. The plugin homepage can be found here. Those of you who know me, know that I’m no Eclipse fanboy, I’m more of an IntelliJ kind of guy, but I find this announcement rather intriguing. It would appear that Microsoft is finally taking an interest in a plugin for Eclipse that would allow people to do C# development using something other than their own product. Next thing you know Microsoft will be announcing Visual Studio will be migrating to the Eclipse platform and .NET developers will now have an IDE that doesn’t completely suck. Sorry Microsoft, but if it weren’t for ReSharper, developing in Visual Studio would be unbearable.

Tagged: .net, eclipse, ide, microsoft, RIA, silverlight