JetBrains has announced the first Public Preview of the free Community Edition of IntelliJ IDEA. Starting with the upcoming version 9.0, IntelliJ IDEA will be offered in two editions: Community Edition, free and open-source, and Ultimate Edition. The Community Edition is expected to remove the barrier to a wider use of IntelliJ IDEA for pure Java development — its price tag. This edition is not only free, but is fully open-sourced.
Community Edition — the choice for those working on pure Java/Groovy applications, or doing Swing development. It has all the crown jewels of IntelliJ IDEA, including various refactorings and code inspections, coding assistance, debugging, TestNG and JUnit testing; CVS, Subversion and Git support, as well as Ant and Maven build integration.
Ultimate Edition — a full-featured commercial IntelliJ IDEA with the complete set of web and enterprise development tools, traditionally providing top-quality support for the most important modern technologies and frameworks.
The new features of version 9 include:
- Java EE 6, with JSF 2.0, JPA 2.0, Servlets 3.0, Bean validation, etc.
- Android, Google App Engine, GWT
- Adobe AIR, FlexUnit
- JavaScript refactorings and debugging
- Tapestry, OSGi
- PHP, and more…