IntelliJ Has a New IDEA (version 8)

EddieC 0 329 Views

Support for RESTful Web services, JBoss Seam and Java refactorings and code inspections are among the new features in IntelliJ IDEA 8, JetBrains' Java IDE for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows that began shipping today. If you're not familiar, JetBrains' raison d'être is to make an integrated development environment that keeps developers productive and integrates tightly with other open source development tools such as Ant, JUnit and Subversion.

Among the new productivity features in IntelliJ IDEA 8 according to a is an ability to jump from a class to its test case; see which Subversion changes have already been integrated into a certain branch; trace where a parameter value comes from through a chain of method calls; change a field parameter from an array to a list and update usages automatically; and extract a code fragment with multiple output values into a method object.

That's just a partial list of major new features not present in version 7. The company also promises faster startup and overall performance thanks to a "reworked engine,", and the ability to revert committed changes, see which tests cover a particular line of code, and specify different encoding for files in different directories.

Available now, IntelliJ IDEA 8 versions range from free for free non-commercial use to personal (US$249) and commercial ($599). Upgrade prices and a 30-day free trial version also are available at the JetBrains download page. There's a new version of the IDEA plug-in developer kit too. "Older versions of some third-party plug-ins may be incompatible with IntelliJ IDEA 8.0 preventing it from starting up," read the plug-in SDK download page. You'll also need a JDK 1.5 build of IntelliJ IDEA to build Mac OS X compatible plug-ins on Windows or Linux.

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Brief, practical upgrade guidance tied to ’s announcement and ’s timing note — focused on avoiding the common pitfalls that follow a major IDE upgrade.

Before installing

  1. Back up IDE settings and project workspaces (use the IDE’s settings export or make a filesystem copy of the configuration and plugins directories).
  2. Commit and tag current work in version control so rollbacks are safe.
  3. Install the new build into a separate directory rather than overwriting the old installation; start the new copy with default settings first and only import old settings after verifying basic startup.

If the IDE won’t start or behaves oddly

  • Treat third‑party plugins as the primary suspect: disable or move the plugins folder and retry startup. Re-enable plugins one at a time to find the offender.
  • Check the IDE log (idea.log) for stack traces that point to a plugin or incompatible library. Restoring the backed-up configuration will return the previous known-good state.

Performance and indexing

  • Exclude build/artifact and large binary folders from the project index to reduce CPU and disk activity during the first runs.
  • If memory is a bottleneck, adjust the JVM options used by the IDE; example idea.vmoptions:
-Xms128m
-Xmx512m
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC

Tune values to match available RAM.

Plugin development and compatibility

  • For plugin authors, keep a development copy of the SDK/build environment that matches the target IDE runtime; test plugins in a clean profile before enabling in a primary workspace.

These steps preserve a working setup while evaluating the new release, make it easy to roll back if needed, and narrow down problems to configuration or third‑party plugins rather than the IDE core.

Member Avatar for peter_budo
peter_budo 2,532 Code tags enforcer

LOL, I just downloaded 7.0.4 last night. Luckily I did not install. Time for new download...

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