Developing codes that are correct in a fast manner is a difficult task, even for senior developers. In conjunction with the abilities of the developer, great tools are involved in providing a simple, flexible, and fast way of developing software. IntelliJ IDEA is one of the most powerful IDEs for Java developers, extending facilities you can find in common IDEs and providing features you’ve probably never seen before.
In this this book, you will learn how to extract the maximum from IntelliJ IDEA 12, beginning with understanding the basic concepts and applying features in real development challenges. You will see your development speed improve naturally and understand why IntelliJ IDEA is considered to be the smartest IDE in the world.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with IntelliJ IDEA 12, presents some features in a superficial way. The intention here, is to show you the features you can expect in IntelliJ IDEA. The chapter begins by showing common features, then it shows you what is new in this version of the IDE. You will also see the differences between the Community Edition and Ultimate versions, and how to install and configure this software. At the end of the chapter is a section where you will see what you can expect in the future versions of IntelliJ IDEA.
Chapter 2, Improving Your Development Speed, will provide a wide range of functionalities that will improve your development speed. In the beginning, it presents to you the main visual interface of the IDE. After this, it shows you how to improve your productivity using the features of IntelliJ IDEA such as the productivity guide, live templates, and navigation usabilities. More development speed techniques are discussed later in the chapter, such as organizing tasks using your favorite issue tracker and how to use TODO marks. At the end of the chapter, a small list of diverse plugins is presented.
Chapter 3, Working with Databases, explores diverse database facilities. Different from the previous two, this chapter uses a practical approach to show the features of IntelliJ IDEA that could make your work with databases even simpler. This chapter begins by showing the Database Tool; here, we will create a simple database using this tool. We will use visual elements to create, edit, and populate a table, and visualize data in a table and filter it. In the end, we will understand how to work with ORM technologies, such as Hibernate, extracting entities from the database we created.
Chapter 4, Web Development, continues using a practical approach to develop a simple web application. In this chapter, some features that are available in all kinds of projects are used, such as refactoring techniques. We start this chapter by creating a web module and configuring the application server. After this is done, we configure the web module to use the frameworks we need such as JSF and Spring. Then, we correct the dependencies of the module using IntelliJ IDEA facilities and develop our code. At the end of the chapter, we develop a simple web service that will be used in the next chapter.
Chapter 5, Desktop Development, will show you how to develop a simple desktop application. In the beginning, we will create a desktop application module and discover the visual editor. While we explore this tool, we will create the GUI of our application and see how the visual editor is integrated with the whole IDE. Then, we will consume the web service we created in the previous chapter and, finally, configure the data binding of our application.