Out-of-the-box

The Intellij IDEA IDE from JetBrains is one of those tools I have wanted to like for years now but it seems I am coming at things from a different perspective and so far it has not worked for me.

I take it for a spin now and then (purchased licenses several times over the years to go beyond a short evaluation) and I thought the recent release of 13 signaled it was time to try it again.

I downloaded the free Community Edition.  I decided to create a JavaFX application as my first action.  I tried it on a MacBook which happen to have a recent build of Java 8 on it.  IDEA found the JDK (this may have been from a previous installation) OK but the app would not run.

The Fatal Error that greeted me after I clicked the Run button was: unable to find package java.lang in classpath or bootclasspath

 My correction was to remove and add back the SDK.  (File -> Project Structure -> SDKs)  I'm not sure how extreme this might be considered by IDEA loyalists but it worked.

Next I told IDEA where it could find SceneBuilder (Intellij IDEA -> Preferences -> JavaFX).  I double-clicked the sample.fxml file and it opened in the IDE's editor.  Control-clicking on it gave me a menu which includes an Open in SceneBuilder option.  I imagine there's a short-cut or setting which makes your first choice more convenient.

Choosing that option, the file opened in SceneBuilder and I made some modifications then ran the application again.

The XML in the file was a bit messy so I wanted to reformat it.  IDEA users would be familiar with the appropriate short-cut (Alt/Cmd/L on the Mac) but I was not.  I first looked for it in the pop-up menu but had to open the Code menu to find it.

This has been a short test but so far IDEA has neither crashed nor burned and I don't dislike it as much as I remember.  Did it work out-of-the-box?  I can't give it an A+ because it's different than any other IDE I have used but I did not get frustrated and was able to create, modify, and run a very simple application fast enough for me to say yes, it did work out-of-the-box.

I will be looking at how it supports Gradle and Groovy next.

Happy coding,
Carl  

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