Jacek Furmankiewicz is a senior developer/designer of the Canadian Compuware Company. He has 12 years of professional IT experience, covering Unix,powerbuilder,c#/microsoft net,java,php and Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.
One, IntelliJ idea 6.0.4
Suppliers |
JetBrains |
Website |
Www.jetbrains.com/idea |
Price |
$499.00 (plus $299.00 upgrade fee) |
Installation
On the Windows platform, IDEA provides a regular EXE installer, while on a Linux platform, it installs only one tar.gz file. Once you have unpacked all the content, you must manually switch to the "bin" subdirectory and execute "./idea.sh". If you do not build the $jdk_home correctly (preferably under your. bashrc file, as shown below), the variable will fail:
JDK_HOME=/home/jacek/Dev/Java/JDK/jdk1.6.0_01
export JDK_HOME
JAVA_HOME=/home/jacek/Dev/Java/JDK/jdk1.6.0_01
export JAVA_HOME
export path=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$path
Unfortunately, JetBrains does not provide a standard. deb or RPM file for any major Linux releases, which makes the installation not well integrated with the desktop (for example, desktop shortcuts are not supported or a K menu entry is created). Even worse, double-clicking the "bin/idea.sh" file from the Konqueror file Manager does not work (it will return an error about the java_home that has not yet been established, although it has actually been built correctly). It seems that the only possible option is to open the command line and execute "./idea.sh" manually. In short, idea's installation experience on the Linux platform requires further simplification. Of the three Ides tested in this article, idea provides the weakest functionality in terms of installation.
General characteristics
Like NetBeans, Idea also provides a flexible layout that provides a docking/fixed/floating panel for a variety of configurations. However, this does not look as smooth and configurable as the NetBeans window System.
However, this is only a small complaint about the outstanding idea Editor--it has been considered one of its masterpieces. In fact, the idea editor is extremely fast and provides complex contextual-sensitive color highlighting, hints, and suggestion pop-ups-not to mention a lot of refactoring options that are extremely impressive. The idea editor is simply the dream of any top programmer. The more time I use it, the more programming skills I'll find to improve development efficiency. I'm sure it's impossible for me to understand all of its functions in such a limited time. The example in Figure 4 below shows an idea editor and its advanced Color/syntax highlighting.
Figure 4: The idea Editor in application