When developing an AJAX application you often end up with some data interchange format, like XML, plain text, or, in my case: JSON. The trouble with JSON, however, it that's it's quite hard to read. Not because it's so complicated, but because it has been optimized for network communication, which in this case, means: all the whitespace has been stripped. Wouldn't it be nice to have an integrated JSON formatter in your IDE to handle this? Well, now it possible!

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Tags: IntelliJ, json, plugin
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Smart code completion has been improved in IntelliJ 8. In the new version of JetBrains' IDE 'even smarter' code completion is added. But first I'll explain what smart code completion is! Basically, it's code completion on steroids, which takes the type of the variable into account too which the new value is assigned to. So, if your assigning a value to a variable of type String, smart code completion will only display methods which are compatible with a String type, and filters the list of methods accordingly. It does even a lot more than this, which you can read about here
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Tags: code completion, ide, IntelliJ
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Coding is refactoring. What starts with a great idea, might prove incorrect in the future. A simple example is the following code:

 
public class Address {
    private String streetName;
    private Integer houseNumber;
 
    // getters and setters
}
 

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Tags: IntelliJ, Java, type migration
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IntelliJ 8 provides 7 new refactorings. One new powerful refactoring is the Introduce Parameter Object. The name speaks for itself: it introduces a parameter object! But what does it really do? The refactoring promotes good encapsulation. It encapsulates fields by introducing a new object for them.

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Tags: IntelliJ, intellij 8, refactoring
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Today, a new release of IntelliJ 8 has been released! It's the magic number 8, and could a better name have been taken? IntelliJ 7 was already a very good Java IDE, but version 8 only builds further on this!

New features of the 8 release are (amongst others):

• SQL integration
• Standard Groovy and Grails integration
• Seam integration
• Maven support greatly improved
• 7 (!!) new Java refactorings
• Adobe Flex support
• And many more improvements!

To celebrate this, I will release a series of blogs about some of the new or improved features of IntelliJ 8! So stay tuned!

Tags: intellij 8, release
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For my current assignment I need to write a script that basically does the following: open war file, download and add files from internet, remove files, change xml and property files, re-package war file.

In pure Java, this would be quite some work to implement. Of course there are several libraries available that will make unzipping, downloading etc a bit easier. But still it would be too much effort for such trivial tasks.

Since it is in fact a script I want to create, why not use a scripting language like Groovy. After two days of coding I must say am very happy with the progress I made given the fact that it is actually my first real Groovy programming experience.

Here are some experiences and code I created so far:
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Filed under Groovy, IntelliJ, Java | 8 Comments »

Erik Pragt shows you in this silent but excellent Screencast how to use Grails in the IntelliJ IDE.

So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!

Filed under Grails, IntelliJ, Podcast | No Comments »

JetBrains' IntelliJ is one of the best IDE's out there. With all those features packed into one package, is quite easy to not be aware of all of them. In this blogposting I will demonstrate some of IntelliJ's best hidden features, which will make developing with this IDE even a bigger pleasure!
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Filed under IntelliJ, Java | 2 Comments »