IntelliJ IDEA Tips

This past week I found two new* features for working in IntelliJ .....

1) Shelves

IntelliJ 7.0 brings the idea of Shelves to its version control and local history features. Basically, by "shelving" local changes, IntelliJ gives you a nice interface to creating a patch for your current work and automatically rolls back the changes to the current VCS version. This makes it easy to experiment with some changes or begin working on something, stop and go back to a previous version to handle some other situation (like a bug fix) and then bring your local changes back. Normally I would just commit my changes to the VCS, but if I am only partially done and they are not complete, I might not want to.

In trying to learn a little bit more about this feature, I noticed a few entries on the interwebs about problems people were having with IntelliJ losing site of their patches or being unable to apply them back. In my limited practice I haven't had any problems and IntelliJ was able to easily add back my changes even when I had modified one of the files in the meantime.

2) Tomcat Plugin Debugging

In the past I have had limited success with application server plugins for Eclipse (they didn't always work, required strange configurations, had memory issues, etc) but they often claimed many great features also (ability to restart from with the IDE, automatic deployment of changes, monitoring, and DEBUGGING).

When I moved to my current employer and began working with IntelliJ instead of Eclipse, and no one I worked with used the built in plugins, I reverted back to the normal command line tools.

The other day we ran into a very strange bug in our development environment which we were able to duplicate locally, but unable to understand with the code's existing level of logging and lack of monitoring features. IntelliJ to the RESCUE!

After ~15 minutes of playing around, figuring out why my compiled classes didn't contain the right debug information, and spending some time trying to figure out where IntelliJ's version of Tomcat wrote it's log files ... I was up and running and able to fully debug my applications code while running it locally in Tomcat.

If anyone is interested in some of the steps I took to get it working, I have uploaded a copy of the quick documentation I created for work here. I wrote the page in word and foolishly saved it as HTML ... which produced tons of crap HTML full of Word specific tags .... luckily I found this tool which removes them. Funny how MS had to release a tool to removed stuff that their tool added in the first place (and probably no one ever used). Its also funny that their link to other advantages for using the tools is name: Use Office HTML Filter to Create Web Pages that Download Faster. Never mind, it only installs if you have Office 2000 installed and we have 2002. :-(

* new to me, which is sad on the second one.