What's New in IntelliJ IDEA 11?

Performance

Improving performance is a non-ending task. IntelliJ IDEA's new editor architecture provides better responsiveness and lag-less typing even in huge documents.

Faster indexing speed is ensured for large codebases and faster IDE startup on all supported platforms.

In-place Refactorings

New in-place UI for refactorings such as Introduce Parameter/Field/Constant or Rename for class members is further improved for better usability.

Event Log view

New 'Event Log' view/tool-window is a single place to see all IDE notifications and take action where needed.

Groovy

• Groovy 2.0 (Beta) support.
• Introduce Closure Parameter refactoring.
• Unwrap statement action.
• New Groovy intention actions:
  • Replace qualified reference with import.
  • Add single-member static import.
  • Add on-demand static import.

VCS Support Improvements

General changes to the workflow such as a new 'Digest' view allow spending less time on the routine VCS tasks such as pre-commit review.

Stack trace highlighting shows recently changed classes and methods differently in stack traces.

Highlights commits included in a given commit (e.g. commits in a current branch) and provides actions like create tag/branch, checkout revision.

The bundled GitHub integration got even better and now supports Gists creation for sharing your code instantly from the IDE.

Ultimate Diff

JAR-files Diff is added and shows real classes/files comparison.
Folder diff now also allows merging folders.

Mac OS X

• Full-screen support on Mac OS X Lion.
• Numerous Mac-specific UI changes.
• Correct window minimization to Dock.

Gradle Integration

Set up your project including modules, libraries, etc. on the basis of a Gradle project file. Yes, it is as simple as it sounds.

Grails 2.0 ^{Ultimate only}

Grails 2.0 is to be released soon but IntelliJ IDEA is already prepared and ensures support for Controller actions as Methods, new JUnit Testing API, access to Gorm API from java classes, Detached Criteria, Grails web-flow, Spock framework, etc.

Velocity 1.7 ^{Ultimate only}

The latest version of Apache Velocity, a Java-based template engine, is fully supported by IntelliJ IDEA 11.

AspectJ ^{Ultimate only}

Further improved AspectJ support features:

• Interface Type Declarations on interfaces too.
• Configurable aspect compiler path for better performance.
• Push-in refactoring, etc.

Play Framework ^{Ultimate only}

IntelliJ IDEA now supports web development with Play Java Web framework. The IDE provides syntax highlighting, formatting, navigation, expressions resolve, completion for built-in tags and parameters and a Structure view.

Spring ^{Ultimate only}

• Spring: improved performance for large models, bean dependency diagram (with new features), "Generate @Autowired dependency" action, etc.
• Spring 3.1 @Configuration contexts, @ComponentScan, @ImportResource, @Profile, @PropertySource.
• Spring Testing: @ContextConfiguration configured with @Configuration array, @ActiveProfile.
• Spring Integration support.
• Spring Data (JPA) support.

SQL ^{Ultimate only}

• Context-aware keyword completion
• H2 and MS SQL Server dialects supported
• PL-extensions for all supported dialects
• User-defined functions added to the
  'Data Sources' view.

Coding

If you like to be on a cutting-edge then the new CoffeeScript editor with syntax highlighting, code assistance, inspections and formatting options is at your service.

One more new language for web developers is LESS. Enjoy the dynamic stylesheets.

Other updates include:

• Updated HTML5 schema,
• Zen Coding 0.7 support.

Testing and Debugging

A powerful interactive XSLT debugger is included with IntelliJ IDEA 11 for debugging of XSLT stylesheets.

JSLint / JSHint integration allows checking your JavaScript code quality as you write it by running external validators.

JavaScript Debugger now lets you customize the properties of an object that you see while debugging. This works for both Firefox and Chrome JS debuggers.