The holiday season is long over by now, but there’s still not too much to tell regarding the main topic of my blog – new features of IntelliJ IDEA 6.0. As the release of IntelliJ IDEA 5.1 is quickly approaching, most of the team has been focused on bugfixing and wrap-up changes for the 5.1 release. So the 5.1 changes are what I’m going to talk about in the next few blog posts.
One change that has been quite exciting for me in particular is that we’ve got a new external contributor for the plugins included in the IntelliJ IDEA distribution. Previously we had three – Bas Leijdekkers is responsible for maintaining and improving InspectionGadgets and IntentionPowerPak plugins originally developed by Dave Griffith, Alexey Efimov is maintaining his Images plugin, and Alexander Kitaev does most of the work on the Subversion integration plugin. They have now been joined by Sascha Weinreuter, a long-time member of the IntelliJ IDEA and plugin development community and the author of the XPathView plugin. Sascha has contributed a number of new inspections (“Incorrect component/action registration” and “Component/Action not registered in plugin.xml”) and a number of smaller enhancements to DevKit, the IntelliJ IDEA plugin which supports development of other plugins. Recently Sascha has also started contributing fixes and improvements to InspectionGadgets. Thanks a lot for your contributions Sascha, and I’m looking forward to your future work. :-)
We are very much interested in getting more active contributors, so if you would like to see your code in the IntelliJ IDEA distribution, go grab the Plugin Development Package, study the source code of the standard plugins (available under the Apache 2 license), and start sending patches to us. We’ll give you commit access to the Subversion repository where the plugins are stored as soon as we decide that we’re satisfied with the quality of your contributions.