Building on a collaboration with Google, software vendor JetBrains has updated its IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE (integrated development environment) to offer more capabilities for creating applications to run on Android devices.
IntelliJ IDEA 13 also features a number of improvements in how it supports the Java Spring framework, which is an essential component for Pivotal's newly launched business intelligence PaaS (platform as a service).
First released in 2001, IntelliJ IDEA is one of a number of popular IDEs used for writing Java applications, alongside Oracle's NetBeans and JDeveloper as well as the open-source Eclipse. Developers have praised the software's ease of use and intuition in anticipating the programmer's next action.
Earlier this year, Google adopted the open-source IntelliJ as the base platform for its own Android Studio, a toolkit to help developers build Android applications more effectively.
In turn, JetBrains folded some of the developments that Google made for Android Studio back into the IntelliJ IDEA itself. Most notably, it now supports Gradle, an open-source package for building, testing and managing software applications. Android Studio provided other refinements for IntelliJ IDEA in the editor and user interface designer as well.
For Spring developers, JetBrains now offers a dedicated tool window for working with the framework, along with an improved method of configuring Spring projects. This version also comes with a deployment tool for deploying code on Cloud Foundry cloud services, such as the one offered by Pivotal, which manages Spring. The deployment tool also works on Red Hat's OpenShift and Heroku's Java PaaS.
The updated IDE also supports the latest versions of the development software it is routinely used with, including Java EE 7, Glassfish 4, Wildfly 8, Tomcat 8, Subversion 1.8, and the upcoming release of Java 8.
Java is the second-most-widely used programming language, behind C, according to the most recent Tiobe index of popular programming languages.
IntelliJ IDEA 13 costs US$199, or $99 for an upgrade, for individual users, and $499, or $299 for an upgrade, for organizations.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com