Frank Sommers: What are main new features in the upcoming release?
Dmitry Jemerov: This milestone release continues in all the directions we had set for version 7.
First of all, we're trying to provide more support for lighter-weight enterprise development technologies: Spring and Hibernate, in particular. Support for Struts was introduced in version 6, then in version 7 we're adding Spring and Hibernate. That support is quite advanced. For example, we introduced Spring AspectJ support in Milestone 2, which is one of the major new features. We also provide some support for JBoss Seam.
Another area we're working on is to deliver an even more productive environment for teams of developers. For instance, we're provide better assistance for mixed-IDE teams, integration with the Maven project, and you can import Eclipse projects directly to IDEA.
We've also been working on improving our version control support, and especially to make you better aware of the changes your colleagues are doing to the code. For example, if you open a file that had been modified by someone else and that you have not yet updated to the latest version, you'll see an immediate notification so that you don't start changing an old version of a file. We also provide quite a nice interface for viewing the history of recently committed changes so you can see who did what, where, and why.
A lot of people are now interested in dynamic languages, and in that connection another area we're making progress in is Ruby support. We started the Ruby development work some time ago, and it has proven quite popular. Now we're introducing a Groovy plug-in. Even though it's just a preview release, it's already quite advanced. We support Rails projects in the Ruby plug-in, and the Groovy plug-in supports Grails.
We have less extensive support for some other languages, too. Scala is an example, which is still a research language, and is not something that's commercially used. We do have a Scala plug-in as a prototype, but we're not actively developing it because we do not see the commercial interest yet. The language itself changes quite a lot right now, and it's a bit hard to track all those changes. So we postponed that work for a while, but we may resume it if we see demand for it.
Frank Sommers: There are many high-quality Java IDEs now in the market. What's the most important characteristic that sets IDEA apart from other Java IDEs?
Dmitry Jemerov: Our attention to small details is quite a bit higher than that in other IDEs. For example, our refactorings work successfully in some cases when other IDEs fail or even produce incompilable code. We add many small usability features all the time. We don't list those in the What's New page on our Web site because there are too many of them: We add lots of those features all the time. I believe that the cumulative effect of all those small, yet significant, differences keeps us ahead.
The final release of IDEA 7 is planned for the end of this year.
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