IntelliJ IDEA 7.0

I had a chance to give IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.1 on my Mac. The latest version of IntelliJ has a wonderful set of new features. I really am enamored with its web services development tools. The support for Apache Axis is a wonderful thing. As a Netbeans user, I have issues around using Axis. It is nice to find first class support.

The support for various frameworks is quite impressive too: GWT, Apache Struts (1.2 and 1.3.x), Spring (1.2.9 and 2.0.7), and Hibernate are great.

Alternative language support has also been added for Ruby and Groovy. They also have the best Javascript editor in an IDE have seen.

One of the biggest strong points for IDEA has always been refactoring. The latest version does not disappoint. There have also been a number of improvements to its code analysis tools. They help the novice to experienced programmer to avoid common mistakes.

One of the nice features that I came across which was not mentioned in the marketing glossies and notes are: JAXB code and schema auto generation. The other one was XmlBeans code auto generation from a schema. Very cool!

My chief complaint about IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.1 is the lack of visual development of JSF. The Netbeans IDE has the best visual JSF tools.

The only other complaint is lack of import/project support for Netbeans projects. Eclipse support is available, but I need the Netbeans support.

My overall impression is great. It provides the Java developer with a great IDE with a number of powerful features/tools. It is definitely worth having in your toolbox.

Building Maps into Your Swing Application with the JXMapViewer

I just read a great tutorial by Joshua Marinacci on using the new Swing Labs JXMapViewer component. His tutorial is on java.net. It took me 15 minutes start to finish to do the tutorial. At the end, I had a wonderful proof of concept for using mapping in a Swing application.

This is a tutorial that should not be missed. It is so well written with plenty of images to demonstrate the steps. BZ to Josh.



I have added a copy of my example application which includes the screenshots above here
You will need to fix the dependencies and point them to the jar files found in the root of the project directory

JavaOne 2008 Tools and Languages Review Team

I have been given quite an honor this year to help as an external reviewer for papers submitted for JavaOne 2008. The review team consisted of a number of great folks from the world of Java. The team included the Java Posse: Dick Wall, Tor Norbye, Carl Quinn, and Joe Nuxoll, Cay Horstmann, Fabiane Nardon, Adam Myatt, John Brock, Sharat Chander, David Folk, Gregg Sporar, and Petr Suchomel. It was quite an honor to be among such a terrific cast of reviwers.

We completed the task in a timely manner, and I am very pleased with the great submissions for this year at JavaOne. There was a lot of thought and consideration given to the proposals. We had over 300+ submissions to examine for merit. In the end, our whole team felt that we had a banner year for submissions. I hope all of the folks at JavaOne appreciate the selections.