JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA Goes Open Source

JetBrains

Famous Java IDE set to flood the market with the newly introduced free Community Edition, available as open source

October 15, 2009

Prague, Czech Republic, October 15, 2009 — JetBrains®, creators of intelligent, productivity-enhancing tools for software developers, have announced the first Public Preview of the free Community Edition of its award-winning Java IDE, IntelliJ IDEA.

Starting with the upcoming version 9.0, IntelliJ IDEA will be offered in two editions: Community Edition, free and open-source, and Ultimate Edition, which until today has been referred to as simply IntelliJ IDEA.

The greatest news is that introduction of the Community Edition removes the only barrier to a wider use of IntelliJ IDEA for pure Java development — its price tag. This edition is not only free, but — and this is especially important — is fully open-sourced.

“We’ve always been open to the community — with our public Early Access Program (EAP), issue trackers, forums, and so on. This made for a tight and direct feedback loop with our users, even at a time when this wasn’t a widely accepted practice in the industry. Since then, we’ve supported hundreds of open-source projects with free product licenses, contributed code to various open-source projects like Groovy and Scala, and developed several open-sourced IntelliJ IDEA plugins ourselves,” said Sergey Dmitriev, JetBrains CEO. “So, you can see how offering the IntelliJ IDEA experience for free, through an open-source license, goes hand in hand with our focus on the community. Open source has become the mainstream, and we continue to embrace it as an exciting challenge. In brief, we’re not changing direction — we’re moving forward.”

The brand new Community Edition is built on the IntelliJ Platform and includes its sources. JetBrains has made it as easy as possible to access and use the source code of the Community Edition and the IntelliJ Platform, by applying the democratic Apache 2.0 license to both of them.

The IntelliJ Platform can, in all fairness, be called the JetBrains’ know-how for building intelligent IDEs. It serves as a basis not only for IntelliJ IDEA itself, but for a wide range of other innovative JetBrains tools, designed for development in specific languages and/or domains. These famous and new tools include RubyMine, MPS, a web development IDE (already in public preview), and others currently in development.
IntelliJ IDEA has been split into two editions based on a very reasonable and obvious functional principle:

• Community Edition — the perfect choice for those working on pure Java/Groovy applications, or doing Swing development. It has all the crown jewels of IntelliJ IDEA, including various refactorings and code inspections, coding assistance, debugging, TestNG and JUnit testing; CVS, Subversion and Git support, as well as Ant and Maven build integration.
• To learn more and download the Community Edition Public Preview, please visit https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/free_java_ide.html.
• Ultimate Edition — a full-featured commercial IntelliJ IDEA with the complete set of web and enterprise development tools, traditionally providing top-quality support for the most important modern technologies and frameworks. The new features of version 9 include:
  • Java EE 6, with JSF 2.0, JPA 2.0, Servlets 3.0, Bean validation, etc.
  • Android, Google App Engine, GWT
  • Adobe AIR, FlexUnit
  • JavaScript refactorings and debugging
  • Tapestry, OSGi
  • PHP, and more…

Key features that set IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition apart include: tight Perforce, Rational ClearCase and Microsoft Team Foundation Server integration, dependency structure matrix, advanced code manipulation with structural search and replace. These and many other capabilities make it a unique tool for extensive professional development on the Java platform.

To review the extended list of new features of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate 9, and to download the Preview build, please visit https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/index.html.

Read about the differences between the Community Edition and the Ultimate Edition at https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/editions_comparison_matrix.html.

Learn more about the open source project for IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition and download its sources at http://www.jetbrains.org.

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About JetBrains

JetBrains is a technology-leading software development firm specializing in the creation of intelligent, productivity-enhancing software. The company is widely known for its innovative, award-winning Java™ integrated development environment, IntelliJ® IDEA (see details on the Web at https://www.jetbrains.com/idea), ReSharper and dotTrace Profiler for .NET developers (see https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper, https://www.jetbrains.com/profiler), RubyMine for Ruby on Rails developers (https://www.jetbrains.com/ruby), and TeamCity — a continuous integration and build management environment (https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity). JetBrains maintains its headquarters in Prague, Czech Republic, with its R&D labs located in St. Petersburg, Russia and Boston, Massachusetts. For more information, see https://www.jetbrains.com.

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Note to Editors: JetBrains, IntelliJ, IntelliJ IDEA, ReSharper, dotTrace, RubyMine and TeamCity are trademarks or registered trademarks of JetBrains, s.r.o. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

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