Vaclav's not-often-used blog

IntelliJ IDEA 8 early access version codenamed Diana is available for download and testing. From my point of view IntelliJ IDEA is the best IDE on the market. Although NetBeans has made tremendous step forward in version 6.0, IDEA is still somehow easier to use, more intuitive with powerful features at your fingertips.

For those who don't know IntelliJ IDEA the best way to describe its advantages is to recommend trial download or reading features. My favorite features are really robust refactoring, code inspections, TeamCity integration and overall ease-of-use. What I miss most is a profiler similar to the available in Netbeans by default. When I spoke with a JetBrains developer I was told that profiler is not planned as it's not requested by many people and it's relatively hard to implement. So if you want a profiler keep JetBrains asking for it.

Alhough there is nothing really interesting for me in this early version (as I don't use the newly supported technologies) you may find them useful:

• Seam support (inspections, code completion, pageflow designer)
  
• FreeMarker support
  
• JavaScript debugger
  
• SQL support (multiple dialects for detecting for features supported by different databases)
  
• Flex support (including debugging)
  
• Struts 2 plugin included by default
  
• Many incremental changes
  

My personal wishlist would be:

• Profiler
  
• Built-in Android support
  
• Free academic license (as using IDEA in classroom for free and forcing students to buy a license doesn't seem right to me)
  

IntelliJ IDEA 8 EAP Release Notes
IntelliJ IDEA 8 EAP Download page