Sarah Allen's Weblog

IntelliJ...not just for Java

I have long heard my Java-geek-colleagues rave about IntelliJ. So, when I recently came across a reason to write some Java code, I thought to download an eval version of the acclaimed IDE.

I went through their QuickStart guide and was impressed. It does syntax coloring, code hinting, and auto-indenting -- all that I've come to expect from an IDE. It also gives warnings -- in real-time -- of problems that I expect to see only at compile time. It integrates Java Docs nicely and has piles of features that promise not to get in the way, but rather, unobtrusively increase productivity. IntelliJ is super-cool for Java, but that’s not all…

Lately I’ve been writing a lot of XML. I’m working at Laszlo, where they’ve managed to cook up a very powerful declarative syntax for effective user interfaces in web applications.

Now Visual Studio .NET does a nice job with XML, but my first attempts at getting the .xsd (XML schema description) to work failed and I hadn’t gotten around to trying again. In IntelliJ’s IDEA, I opened up a rather complex XML file (from the Laszlo sample contacts app), and started typing… <window …and up pops the rest of the tag attributes for me to fill in. You have to see it to believe it. It inferred the rest of the tag from what was already in the document. It's like magic.