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IntelliJ Gets Azure Cosmos DB Support in Microsoft Java Tooling Update

• By David Ramel
• October 14, 2022

The latest update of Java on Azure Tooling, announced last week, comes with new support for the Azure Cosmos DB and enhancements to Azure Virtual Machine functionality.

While the dev team is responsible for a variety of Java on Azure tooling, it often focuses on the IntelliJ IDEA integrated development environment (IDE) from JetBrains. In fact, Microsoft offers the Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ on the JetBrains Marketplace, even though IntelliJ IDEA it might be seen as a competitor to Microsoft's own tooling, such as Visual Studio Code.

And it's that offering that sees new support for Azure Cosmos DB, a fully managed, serverless NoSQL database for high-performance applications of any size or scale in the Azure cloud computing platform.

"Database management support is always one of our key investment areas," said Microsoft's Jialuo Gan in an Oct. 10 post announcing the September 2022 update. "We know a lot of developers have been waiting for the integration of Azure Cosmos DB with our product. Together with the Azure Cosmos DB team, the Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ IDEA has supported Mongo/Cassandra API/SQL Management from Azure Explorer directly with the latest release. Besides, we have also supported Mongo API in the 'Database Tool' Window (IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition only). For more details about these new features, please see IntelliJ support for Azure Cosmos DB."

The team also worked to improve Azure VM functionality, specifically the recently introduced entry of "Azure Virtual Machine" under the "Run On" targets list of run/debug configurations of IntelliJ IDEA.

"In Azure, there are multiple ways to connect to a Linux virtual machine," Gan explained. "The most common practice of connecting to a Linux VM is using the Secure Shell Protocol (SSH). For more details, you can see the documentation about connect to a Linux VM. In addition, we know that SFTP is a very widely used protocol which many organizations use today for transferring files within their organization or across organizations."

Support for those features in the latest IntelliJ tooling release includes:

• Use SSH directly from an Azure Virtual Machine resource node in Azure Explorer.
• Browse files of an Azure Virtual Machine in Azure Explorer.

Furthermore, to enhance the experience for using Azure SDKs with Java, the team added support for adding/updating dependencies to current local projects directly from Azure SDK Reference Book feature. Gan said this addresses issues like finding Azure SDKs and add/update relevant dependencies directly in the IDE specifically in Azure services, and also dealing with many content switches or redirects for Azure services before being able to actually get started using SDK libraries.