Tapestry 5 Support in IDEA Maia

The next generation of IDEA, Maia will include Tapestry 5 support; this is according to Hugo Palma, who wrote the initial version of the IDEA Tapestry plugin that has been expanded for inclusion in Maia. Cool!

Is it time to abandon IDEA for Eclipse?

I've been a big fan of IDEA since I made the switch about two years ago ... but as I've run each new preview release of IDEA it seems to be getting slower and slower. My Tapestry integration tests take about 5 to 6 minutes to run from the command line; inside IDEA the time to run has recently spiked up: they are now taking 15 - 20 minutes ... I just had a run take nearly 30! My suspicion is that it has something to do with all the console output from the tests. I see the launched Java process (which runs TestNG, Selenium and Jetty) consuming 3% of CPU and IDEA consuming 97%. IDEA is almost completely non-responsive while the tests run. I run both IDEA and the launched Java process with 600M max heap.

Two years ago, IDEA was stable and Eclipse was not runnable on Mac OS X. That's what prompted my first switch to IDEA. I'm now finding Eclipse to run faster on OS X and on Ubuntu. Lately, I feel pulled in the opposite direction: IDEA is quickly becoming too painful to use!

Running IDEA 8.1.1

I've switched to IDEA 8.1.1 (i.e. build 9742) and it's working very nicely. It has plugins available for Clojure and GIT, which is nice.

Faster and more stable than 8.0 would be nice; we'll see if that works out in practice. Also, I've configured my environment to use JDK 1.6 (not 1.5) as the default JDK; so that should help with performance as well. I need to decide whether compiling with JDK 1.6 but targetting JDK 1.5 is sufficient for Tapestry releases, or whether I should switch back to 1.5 when creating releases.

Meanwhile, I've been updating my training workshop (in case I end up teaching at Skills Matter in London any time soon), and I'm switching over to using Eclipse, not IDEA, for the workshop. I think people will appreciate the familiarity of Eclipse, even under Ubuntu. There goes my chance to change the world, though!

IDEA 8.1 on Mac

Installed it, launched it. Immediately: Jetty Integration is not compatible and disabled. Strike one. Sure, it has GIT integration and promises to be much faster (which I'm getting desperate for, as I seem to watch the cursor spin quite a bit too much). However, my level of trust dropped through the floor when I saw just how many graphics glitches are all over the screen ... it doesn't inspire confidence that it was tested on a Mac at all. Back to 8.0.1.