JetBrains, a developer of productivity-enhancing tools for software developers, has announced the first public preview of the free community edition of its Java IDE, IntelliJ IDEA.
The company said that its upcoming version 9.0 of IntelliJ IDEA will be offered in two editions, community edition, which is free and open-source; and Ultimate Edition.
According to JetBrains, the new community edition is built on the IntelliJ Platform and includes the company’s other sources. The community edition has various refactorings and code inspections, coding assistance, debugging, TestNG and JUnit testing; CVS, Subversion and Git support, and Ant and Maven build integration. Users can also access and use the source code of the community edition and the IntelliJ Platform through the Apache 2.0 license.
The IntelliJ Platform serves as basis not only for IntelliJ IDEA itself, but for a wide range of other JetBrains tools, designed for development in specific languages and/or domains. These new tools include RubyMine, MPS, a web development IDE.
JetBrains said that the Ultimate Edition is a full-featured commercial IntelliJ IDEA with a
set of web and enterprise development tools providing support for modern technologies and frameworks. It features Java EE 6, with JSF 2.0, JPA 2.0, Servlets 3.0 and Bean validation; Android, Google App Engine, GWT; Adobe AIR, FlexUnit; JavaScript refactorings and debugging; Tapestry, OSGi; and PHP.
The company claims that the features that set IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition apart include tight Perforce, Rational ClearCase and Microsoft Team Foundation Server integration, dependency structure matrix, advanced code manipulation with structural search and replace.
Sergey Dmitriev, CEO of JetBrains, said: We’ve always been open to the community – with our public Early Access Program (EAP), issue trackers, forums, and so on. This made for a tight and direct feedback loop with our users, even at a time when this wasn’t a widely accepted practice in the industry.
“So, you can see how offering the IntelliJ IDEA experience for free, through an open-source license, goes hand in hand with our focus on the community. Open source has become the mainstream, and we continue to embrace it as an exciting challenge. In brief, we’re not changing direction – we’re moving forward.
