Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Things I Love About IntelliJ IDEA: The Impossible is Possible

The features I've written about so far are the ones that I use really often and that I find make the biggest difference for me when I use IntelliJ IDEA. Some of them are a bit mundane, but when I have to code without them I often get the feeling of being bogged down in typing boilerplate.

But there is another side to IntelliJ - an exciting side! IDEA has a whole host of features which, to me, are bordering on mind-blowing. There are quite a few features in IDEA that are so impressive that I don't just think, "That's a clever idea. I'm glad they put that in." What I really think is, "How the hell did they even IMAGINE that that was POSSIBLE?!" Seriously, the Jetbrains guys have implemented tools that I would have laughed at if they were proposed to me, just from the sheer audacity of the ideas and the complexity that I imagine would be involved in implementing them.

One domain where they have been impressing me lately is in their Hibernate integration. If you tell IDEA about a datasource that your Hibernate entities should be able to map to, it can do some cool things like tell you that no table exists with the same name as your entity, or that the column name in your @Column annotation doesn't match any column in the database table. There's also the HQL console, where you can run HQL queries against your database, complete with code-completion from your domain model. Both of these are "Cool, that's useful" features, but I imagine your mouth is not yet agape.

Then they go to the next level: the same code completion that's available in the HQL editor is also available write in the middle of your code using language injection. That's right, those Strings in your Repository classes are no longer just Strings - that first double quote now denotes the point at which Java stops and HQL starts, and IDEA will give you all the help you need to write a query that is correct both syntactically and in respect of your domain model, with name completion, underlining of errors and meaningful error messages. (To enable HQL editing in a class just hit Alt-Enter, select 'Inject Language', then 'HQL')

But after the Jetbrains guys implemented that awesome integration, they got bored, so they had to think of something even more amazing to integrate. Now I see that in the upcoming IntelliJ IDEA X, they have added similar integration to queries created using Hibernate's Criteria API. The ingenuity involved in this feature astounds me - IDEA is observing the annotations on Hibernate entities, parsing Java code and recognising a Criteria query, then building enough understanding of that query and linking it in with the knowledge from the entity classes to be able to make suggestions about the possible and legal properties and relationships that could be queried. It's another example of IDEA being so intelligent that it probably knows more about my code than I do, and the guys have probably re-written half of Hibernate in order to give it to us.

As I said, this is just one domain (no pun intended) that has been impressing me lately. IntelliJ IDEA is full of little nuggets likes this where the Jetbrains developers have dreamed up and then delivered features that are useful so far beyond any little improvements or tweaks that I could have requested as a day-to-day user. This isn't the product of a team of developers tirelessly implementing feature requests from users - it's the constantly evolving creation of a group of highly visionary people who intimately understand the day to day tasks of a coder but are also able to rise above the detail and imagine a better future where the tools don't just help out with the boilerplate but also start to take on some of the heavy lifting.

4 comments:

  1. It's tools like IntelliJ that make it hard for me to do any real work in other programming languages. No other languages have IDEs this powerful.

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  2. The language is broken if you need an IDE to use it productively.

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  3. I agree intellij is great, but don't ignore eclipse.

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  4. @fastcodejava: I absolutely love ignoring Eclipse.

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