Was given IntelliJ IDEA 6 for free, last week, for presenting at the local San Diego Java Users Group. Very nice gesture
SDJUG and
JetBrains!
Only played with
IntelliJ IDEA for about an hour, so far...
Here's some commentary:
Pros:
1. Has support from Subversion, CVS, JavaScript, EJB 3.0, Google WebToolkit, CSS, HTML, JSP, & Web Services, all built-in, right out of the box!
2. Seems like it has a powerful debugger.
3. Everything looks a lot better (the fonts are aesthetically pleasing) and runs faster.
4. Seems to have better intelli-sense and code completion. Even supports annotations and has useful custom annotations built-in.
5. Seems to be very useful when one is doing hard core J2EE development (Servlets, JSP, EJB, App Server Config, server side debugging, etc.)
6. Has JUnit 3.8.1 support built-in.
Cons:
1. What I can say so far is that it seems a lot more complex than Eclipse.
You set up a new project and then need to set up module (sub-project), under IDEA.
I like Eclipse's Project Layout better...
2. I created a "Hello Unnsse" program, just to see it run from the Console, it compiled and ran correctly but it did not launch a Console view.
I also could not see anywhere I could "Show the Console" view. Doesn't seem as customizable (by dragging and dropping perspectives as you can in Eclipse). I am sure I'll be able to do all of this or find a walk-around, some time, in the near future.
3. On OS X, everything ran smoothly, but on WinXP every-time I click on the "X" in the top right hand corner, it crashed! This happened like 3 times!
Am definitely going to report this to JetBrains.
4. Really heavy duty. Lots of refactoring and keyboard hot keys.
5. When I did a SVN Import of one of my projects, it asked where to create and name the top-level directory (didn't make it for you, by default!), and that was it! Didn't make a new project with the appropriate sub packages / folders. Need to still figure this out. This is really annoying.
6. Eclipse 3.2 lets you choose between JUnit 3.8.1 and JUnit 4.
Even though consists of equal number of line items with "Pros" and "Cons", I am still frustrated with several of the "Cons"....
I am sure that after a while I will have a better evaluation and a different opinion regarding IDEA.
