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
Filed under IntelliJ, Java | 7 Comments »