elstar IT

In Januari I started on a new role, Full Stack developer at Rabobank.

One of the developers in my team is a big fan of IntelliJ from JetBrains, so I gave it a try over the past weeks.

I must say I don’t miss Eclipse at all.

Currently I am running it on macOS, but also in a VDI of the customer, which runs Windows.

What is IntelliJ

It is a very complete IDE, not for Java development only, but also Front end development, like AngularJS, because WebStorm is part of IntelliJ Ultimate.

Lots of integration is already build in and if still need other plugins, JetBrains has a plugin catalog.

There is a free version, but when you want to go down the road the Ultimate version is your friend.

What do I like the most

Here are some things I found I liked the most, and I only scratched the surface.

• Autocomplete when coding is much intuitive then you know from Eclipse. Makes coding easier and quicker.
• Maven actions are easy collected in one panel, where you get a direct overview of all the Lifecycle action, but you can also create custom extension, like ‘mvn clean install’. If profiles are used in the pom.xml you can select them when package or deploy an project
• Build in Terminal or CMD. Very convenient, no extra window need to be opened
• Click on a Java class and a select the action ‘create Test’. It will give a choice which methods need to be tested and with which JUnit version. It will generate directly a test class, and packages in the test folder. Gives you a head start to write unit tests.
• When running tests. in sidebar icons are visible to run the whole test class or only one method in this class.
• The IDE identify new files or languages, and give you suggestions, what can or need to be done. For example I added a Docker file to deploy our Spring Boot application to Docker. IntelliJ made the suggestion to set up an Docker environment. Cool…
• Build in tooling for Spring Framework, for me the defacto lately.
• Build in database connectivity with SQL datasources, easy to set up via the settings. Which makes the use of PL/SQL developer not necessary anymore.
• Really extended integration with Source Control Systems, like Git, with good visibility of all the branches which I liked about GitFlow in SourceTree.
• I can immediately also develop an AngularJS application, without switching IDE.

For me it will be the main IDE and I discover every day new features. Admit that Eclipse can full fill lots of these features, but IntelliJ has taken it a step further. Which gives my a total IDE.