2 Java

Jetbrains released a Google App Engine plugin for their IntelliJ IDE. I did not see any announcement about this at all.

New project inside IntelliJ for Google App Engine

You will have a new option when creating a new project. After supplying the path to the local app engine SDK your almost good to go. I needed to add the app engine jars as libraries to my project. That being out of the way you can start coding, run you local server (a pre configured run configuration is supplied) and also deploy it to Google all from within IntelliJ. I tested it with a very basic example with local development and remote deployment and this works really nice.

Thanks Jetbrains.

From the release notes:

This plugin provides the following features:

• option on “Technologies” page of the module wizard to quickly create:
• appengine-web.xml descriptor
• App Engine Facet
• App Engine Dev server run configuration
• inspection to report forbidden code in App Engine application
• run configuration for Google App Engine Dev server
• action for uploading an application to Google (Tools | Upload App Engine Application)

3 Development

I’m pretty busy at work right now but I could find some time to add one more feature to my little property sorter plugin for IntelliJ Idea.

Comments above property entries will now be preserved when you sort the file.

The plugin is available from within Idea or at Google Code.

From unsorted ...

... to sorted with comments.

1 Development

We are using JSF, Facelets and Spring Webflow in the product I’m currently working on. What bugged me for some time already was that when we started to refactor the domain and the corresponding dto’s the GUI was a problem since the variables which get pulled out of the webflow are just string declarations. I had to go to each xhtml file and change the code to reflect the access to the new properties.

For some reason I missed a feature of IntelliJ IDEA completely.

If you are using Spring Webflow your code might look like this:

<tr:outputText value="#{flowScope.myViewBean.creditCardDto.fullName}"/>

You get no code completion nor refactoring security.

Now it is possible to make this a little bit better.

<c:set value="#{flowScope.creditCardDto}" var="creditCardDto"></c:set>
<!--@elvariable id="creditCardDto"
     type="net.wehrens.accounting.CreditCardDto"-->
<tr:outputText value="#{creditCardDto.fullName}"/>

With the clever Inspection ‘Declare External Variable in Comment Annotation‘ (just press Alt+Enter on the usage of creditCardDto) IDEA creates a comment annotation which tells the IDE of what type the given variable is. Since you are using webflow, you would pull the needed variable with a c:set tag out of the flowScope (or any other scope) and then declare the variable and it’s type.

There you go.

You can now start refactoring the creditCardDto and the GUI will reflect the changes. No more manual editing.

To make sure the comments do not get rendered out to the client (and with that the class information) you can turn that off for faclets in the web.xml configuration.

<context-param>
    <param-name>facelets.SKIP_COMMENTS</param-name>
    <param-value>true</param-value>
</context-param>

This is not specific to JSF, facelets or anything. This works with Freemaker, JSP’s and others as well.

My life just got a whole lot better.

6 Java

I do work with language property files pretty much every day (since I’m the GUI guy in the team). The files are updated on different branches copied up to the trunk and merged down to new branches, sometimes even updated by our product owner. We got a couple of times into not so funny merge conflicts since people did not sort the property files in the same way. To get around that we used an external tool to sort the files just before committing them.

Right, we can do better than this.

I wrote a small plugin for IntelliJ IDEA (and turns out my colleague too) for sorting these inside IDEA. I took the easy approach to sort them in the editor window. Simply open a properties file and choose Code – Sort Properties. It detects if this is a real properties file (e.g. all lines do have a # at the start or do follow the pattern key=value) and sorts them. If things go boom you always can undo .

You can get it from here. It’s just 7KB since I did not include the testng jars.

0 Java

I do love IntelliJ IDEA but the 8.0 release had some issues with indexing and compiler caches.
Version 8.1 is out and addresses these issues (among other things, e.g. git support). Hurray.