Top Reasons to Upgrade
You're considering upgrading to IntelliJ IDEA 8, but how do you know if upgrading is right for you?
In the newest version of IntelliJ IDEA, we've added support for a lot of technologies — some new, and some that have evolved over the year. We've also redoubled our focus on core Java development, to improve your code quality and make development easier. Finally, we've made key changes to the IDE that have increased IntelliJ's speed, and allowed us to support future languages and technologies with ease — making IntelliJ IDEA a dependable standard for the future. Upgrading to IntelliJ IDEA 8 is right for you if...
New Technologies
If your project uses new technologies for which we've added support, the upgrade decision should be a no-brainer. If you're using Seam, Spring WebFlow, Struts 2, RESTful WebServices, FreeMarker or Velocity, the level of comfort that you get when working with any of these technologies is like day and night compared to version 7.
This extends to technologies that have evolved over the last year. If your team wants to stay up to date,
upgrading is the right decision. Full support for Spring 2.5, GWT 1.5 and Subversion 1.5 is new
in IntelliJ
IDEA 8.
Core Java Development
If new frameworks and new technologies aren't your thing, you'll be interested in the major improvements we've made to Core Java support. Upgrading to IntelliJ IDEA 8 buys you a year's worth of core Java development improvements. This upgrade includes 7 new refactorings, around 20 new inspections (which means 20 types of problems that your team won't ever encounter again in their code), and a new set of tools for automatically creating unit tests and navigating between classes and their tests. Of course there's much more than that, but the full set of improvements is too large for this document.
Speed and Dependability — into the future
If your team is interested in a faster IDE that will support them well into the future, you'll be interested in the two major upgrades that the IntelliJ Core has gone through.
The first improves startup speed, reduces memory usage, and builds projects faster, which means less waiting and more working, and developers who are generally happier by the end of the day.
The second has allowed us to refactor the entire tool to extract a common IDE platform. This ensures that our codebase will stay manageable and flexible in the coming years, and it has already enabled us to develop support for other languages like Ruby and Python easier and faster than ever before — so when your team decides to migrate to new technologies and languages, you can be comfortable knowing that IntelliJ IDEA will be right there with you.
And last but not least, staying up to date with the latest version means a much better level of support just in case you encounter any problems with our product. If you report a bug to us, you'll often be able to download a build containing the fix within a week or two, and you won't have to resort to workarounds in order to continue working smoothly.
Like we mentioned earlier, this is simply a short-list of the improvements included in IntelliJ IDEA 8. The best way to evaluate whether upgrading is right for your team, is to test the new version directly on your projects. Download a free 30-day evaluation of IntelliJ 8, and feel free to ask our team any questions.
Upgrade now