News

JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, and RubyMine Updates

• By John K. Waters
• March 30, 2023

Software development toolmaker JetBrains has announced the 2023.1 versions of its three integrated development environments (IDE's): IntelliJ IDEA,  WebStorm, and RubyMine.

IntelliJ is the company's IDE for Java and other languages. WebStorm is its IDE for JavaScript and TypeScript. And RubyMine is its Ruby on Rails dev tool. (JetBrains is also the creator of the Kotlin programming language.)

This release of IntelliJ comes with a range of new features and improvements, including an updated UI, which provides users with "a more polished and seamless experience," the company says. The latest performance enhancements have resulted in faster Maven imports, the company says, earlier availability of IDE features when opening projects, and a streamlined commit process enabled by background commit checks. IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, provides a rich set of built-in developer tools and outstanding support for the Spring framework.

The list of new and enhanced capabilities in IntelliJ IDEA 2023.1 includes:

The beta release of new UI enhancements: The new UI has been overhauled based on the feedback from users, the company says. The range of changes includes the new Compact Mode, which provides a more consolidated look and feel of the IDE; an option to vertically split the tool window area just like in the old UI; a reworked Run widget; and more.

Earlier availability of IDE features on project opening: The company has improved the IDE "startup experience" by performing the Scanning files to index process in smart mode. "Doing so makes the IDE’s full functionality available much earlier in the startup process," the company says. "When opening a project, IntelliJ IDEA 2023.1 uses existing caches from your previous session with the project and simultaneously looks for files to index. If no changes are found in the scan, the IDE will be ready, eliminating the delays that were previously caused by indexing on startup."

Faster import of Maven projects: Accomplished through the optimization of dependency resolution, as well as reworking the processes behind importing and configuring facets.

Background commit checks: The company has reworked the behavior of commit checks for Git and Mercurial to speed up the overall commit process. Checks are now performed in the background after the developer commits, but before the push. 

Navigation to Spring Security matchers and request mappings: To simplify the ability to see applied security rules, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate 2023.1 provides easy navigation to security matchers from Spring controllers. The navigation works both from security matchers to controllers and vice versa, the company says.

WebStorm is an IDE designed to provide out-of-the-box support for JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, and CSS, as well as frameworks such as React, Angular, and Vue.js. Key features of the IDE include intelligent code completion, on-the-fly error detection, and navigation and refactoring capabilities. WebStorm 2023.1 introduces support for Astro, an open-source framework for generating web applications on top of popular UI frameworks, such as React, Preact, Vue, and Svelte. It's available via a plugin that users can install from the JetBrains Marketplace.

Ruby on Rails is a web application development framework written for the Ruby programming language and designed to make programming web applications easier. RubyMine 2023.1 provides Rails 7 and Ruby 3.2 support, as well as new UI updates, faster code completion, decreased memory consumption, improved gem synchronization on WSL, and enhanced Docker integration, among other improvements.