IntelliJ IDEA 13 was recently released – download now!

What’s New provide a comprehensive list of new features in this release, and there are plenty! Needless to say the features that I’m most excited about is Java EE 7 and WildFly support.

Here are some of the highlights for Java EE 7 in IDEA 13:

• Support for JavaServer Faces 2.2 including a rich set of coding assistance features for flows, actions, contracts, pass-through attributes, and more.
• Improved navigation, code analysis, and diagrams for injected beans, including Context and Dependency Injection 1.1 annotations and beans.xml configuration.
• New JAX-RS 2.0 and WebSocket annotations are supported with additional code completion and analysis for path parameters; improved REST Client tool window (now with authorization capabilities and requests history.)
• Advanced coding assistance for Batch Processing jobs definition, including specific code completion, navigation, code analysis, and many more.
• Easier project configuration: no need to download or configure Java EE libraries if they are bundled with application server you’re using. This was my personal pet peeve for the longest time and is very clean now.

Andrey Cheptsov (from JetBrains), Antonio Goncalves (a very famous Java person and myself did a webinar a few days ago highlighting some of these capabilities. A replay of the webinar is now available:

Here is a quick tutorial and a playlist of videos that show the Java EE 7 features in detail:

WildFly 8 Beta2 snapshot can be easily configured as well:

Here are some additional videos for you to get started:

• How to import Java EE 7 samples from GitHub,
• How to test RESTful web applications using REST Client tool window,
• How to debug WebSockets,
• And finally how to configure Java EE 7 using Gradle.

A fully imported Java EE 7 samples repo is shown below:

IntelliJ has definitely matured a LOT since I tried it first a few years ago. Congratulations to the entire team for a release well done, especially Andrey who really listened to all the feedback and Philip Torchinsky (ex-colleague and a friend) who triggered my interest back in IntelliJ.

Note that Java EE support is only available in Ultimate Edition, not the free Community Edition. Compare the feature sets between the two here. Both the bundles are available for download here.

Also note, IDEA 13 still requires JDK 6 for retina display although there is a hack available for JDK 7.