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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: IDEA 4.0 - Projects and Classpaths
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This is my first blog of the "what i like most in IDEA 4" series. After getting the long awaited final version, i installed it right on and was very confident with the results. I have only tested VERY early EAP versions of IDEA, so most of the features were absolutely new to me. One note before i step into todays topic: What the hell have they done to get the UI so damn responsive, this really feels like a native app.
IDEA now supports the concept of modules inside projects, giving us the ability to really do some code re-usage. And with the complete rewrite of the project handling, they also tackled the classpath issue. You can now configure "global Libraries" which can be seen in every project or module. The best of it all, you can also attach Javadocs and Sources to the libraries. Setting up a project can be done in a few seconds now and this is very desireable, because when working with many revisions of the same project (CVS), you really need to create a project quickly, after checking out a new revision. This was ok in version 3 of IDEA, but is beaten by the new Version in any way.
The same goes for JDK definitions. IDEA 3 was quite good at this, because it was very intuitive. With 4, you can specifiy wether you want to use your "Project-JDK" or a custom "Module-JDK". Nice. Furthermore "dependencies" gives you the ability to use classes from other modules without referencing them as Library jar or something.
Without doubt, the complete rewrite of the project handling was worth the effort by the Jetbrains guys. And there is so much more to explore, but this will be covered later.
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