I’m revisiting IntelliJ IDEA this week. I haven’t used since version 3.0 (it’s up to version 4.5), for various reasions, including having worked for a company that not only made competing products but also once employed the original creators of IDEA and thus not being able to get authorization to buy it. I’m eager to see how much IDEA has improved since the last time I used it. In the intervening period, Eclipse has made massive improvements, so I can only imagine what the folks at IntelliJ have done.

Update: This experiment is over before it started. I tried to migrate the webapp I was working on from Eclipse/MyEclipseIDE to IDEA and ran into all sorts of weird problems. I was also put off by the ugly Swing interface and the fact that it seemed to screw up the screen fonts when it displayed them. Finally, it didn’t integrate as smoothly with Tomcat as MyEclipseIDE does. I’m certain that IDEA remains the best product for editing actual Java code, but the supporting infrastructure really disappointed me.