Give Intelli J a Try
When I first started working at The Ladders, I used Eclipse. It was the standard editor for a programmer. Most people in tech use it. However, Josh kept raving about how great Intelli J was. I was skeptical at first, but after Eclipse kept crashing on me, I decided to give Intelli J a try.
After a few days of using Intelli J, I was amazed. It increased my productivity by at least 300 percent. Tracing and debugging code is a breeze in it. Every piece of code that refers to another piece can be reach by simply ctrl + clicking.
There are many “haters” of Intelli J. Their main argument is that Eclipse is free while Intelli J costs $499 for a commercial license. That is where their argument ends. There is really nothing in Eclipse that’s actually better than Intelli J. There are however many things that Intelli J does better than Eclipse:
-Click through every thing. If there is a .jspf file in a jsp, I can ctrl + click it and go to the file. If there is a jstl tag, I can ctrl + click it and go to the .tld file. I can even ctrl + click the function signature in the tld file and it’ll bring me to the function definition. Amazing! If I’m perusing an interface, there is a little button next to every method that allows me to go to the method implementation instantly. Eclipse has no such button. This saves a lot of time especially with manager interfaces that implement a method that calls a DAO interface that implements a DAO method.
-A change list for all your changes. For example, I create a change list called “fix ladders bug”. All the changes I make to fix this bug gets stored in this change list. But let’s say while I’m fixing the ladders bug, I have to switch to a recruit ladder bug. I just create a new change list and start working on my changes. When I finish, I can commit my recruit ladder change list and nothing that I changed for the ladders fix gets committed. Ingenious? Yes.
-Search results are tabbed! What a wonderful idea that Eclipse chose to never implement. If I do a search for a usage of a method, the search result is saved and tabbed so I can go back to it at anytime.
-There are a bunch of navigation features in Intelli J that are quite useful. You can use Ctrl + Alt + Left or Right arrow to go back and forth where you’ve been editing. It’s kind of like a go back button in a web browser except it goes to different places in the same file.
Do yourself a favor and get the Intelli J 30 day free trial. You can thank me later.
Comments
The IntelliJ free trial is available here
Posted by: Marc Limotte | July 25, 2007 07:07 PM