Intellij IDEA Community Edition

My colleague Andrew pointed out to me that IntelliJ have decided to open-source their phenomenal IDEA development environment.

I think this is wonderful news, and I'm quite interested in learning more about IDEA and seeing whether a true community forms.

To start, I've begun experimenting with IDEA and Derby:

• I downloaded and installed the new Community Edition IDE on my Ubuntu development machine.


• I enabled several of the core plug-ins, including those for basic Java development, those for Ant support, and several of the source code control plug-ins


• I checked out a fresh copy of the Derby trunk and created a new IDEA project against that source tree.


• I used the Ant support in IDEA to build Derby.


• I defined a configuration to run the Derby "ij" command line tool


• I ran the IDEA debugger, and was able to set breakpoints and step through the Derby source in the debugger.

This was a great first step, and very exciting. Now I'm motivated to learn more about IDEA, and see if it can make me more productive in my Derby work.