Big news from JetBrains. Their IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE will be offered in a free Open Source edition from version 9.0. The free version will include all the JavaSE features, version control integrations for CVS, Git and Subversion, support for unit testing with JUnit and TestNG, and language support for Groovy and Scala. The full paid-for version will add the enterprise Java tools, UML diagrams, more version control integrations, and language support for SQL, PHP, JavaScript and more.
IntelliJ IDEA is, in my opinion, faster and more powerful than NetBeans and slicker and more intuitive than Eclipse.
As well as opening up the Java IDE, JetBrains are open-sourcing the IntelliJ platform, which is the foundation of all of their IDEs. As a bonus, they’ve chosen to use the permissive Apache Licence rather than less commercial-friendly GPL.
At the time of writing, the JetBrains web server appears to have crumbled under the weight of the traffic that this announcement has prompted.