JetBrains improves IntelliJ IDEA with version 11.1

JetBrains, the company behind the IntelliJ IDEA polyglot IDE, has announced the release of IDEA 11.1; this includes new features such as support for Subversion 1.7 and Gradle, as well as a new user interface for displaying Git branches. In October of 2009, IntelliJ announced an open source version of the project and it is now available in two editions: an open source community edition for Java, Groovy and Scala development, and, a commercially supported and more fully featured "Ultimate" edition, with support for frameworks such as Java EE and Spring, and tools to assist deployment and debugging.

Both versions gain Subversion 1.7 support as well as UI improvements in the Project and Debugger tools and also when viewing Git branches. They also benefit from new Emacs editor features, improvements to Groovy 2.0 and Gradle support; there are also several new features in the Android development tools, such as Lint and DDMS integration.

Features only available in the Ultimate Edition of IntelliJ IDEA 11.1 are the introduction of move and rename operations in Perforce, JPA integration with the Play Java web framework, support for the Hibernate 4.1 persistence framework and improvements to the Spring and SQL features of the IDE. This version also makes development for Adobe Flash and Flex easier by simplifying the setup process for such projects. Furthermore, the Ultimate Edition now supports ECMAScript 6 with the Traceur compiler preview mode.

A detailed breakup of the new features between both editions can be found on the JetBrains web site, which also lists improvements that were added since the release of IntelliJ IDEA 11.

Both editions of IntelliJ IDEA 11.1 are now available for download. The downloadable Ultimate Edition is a time-limited evaluation version and is available for sale, (£395 for a commercial licence, £158 for individuals). Free of charge licences for Ultimate Edition are available for educational institutions and open source projects. The Community Edition is licensed under the Apache 2.0 licence and its source code is available from the IntelliJ community site.

(fab)