GWT, App Engine, maven, and… IntelliJ!

I’ve been putting off migrating to Android Studio for a while now because I’m frankly loathe to learn a new IDE. I’ve used Eclipse for a decade and grew to become very productive in it. But a completely different team at Google may have just well forced me into it.

When I joined the GWT Developer Relations team in 2010, I worked closely with the Google Plugin for Eclipse team to get maven support into GPE. With their excellent work, we eventually achieved the holy grail: you could import a POM containing maven-gae-plugin and gwt-maven-plugin into Eclipse and all the GWT + GAE stuff from GPE like launching dev mode would just work (well, if you had the right supporting plugins like m2e-wtp). So the other day, I picked up a POM that worked in those days and tried it out on Kepler + GPE + m2e-wtp. Amazingly enough, the GWT stuff still works. Google now supports its own appengine-maven-plugin, so I swapped out the old GAE plugin for the new. It’s supposed to work with GPE and WTP, but so far no dice. It will be great when they get the kinks worked out. Funny thing is, I remember seeing exactly the same problem with GAE-maven integration way back in my GWT days. Only then, I could just walk over to Rajeev’s desk and he would fix it 🙂

In the mean time, imagine my surprise to discover that I could just import the POM into IntelliJ (full edition) and everything works. The maven project imported, I can launch GWT dev mode, set breakpoints and debug, etc. It’s funny to me that JetBrains can keep up to date with Google App Engine better than the GPE team, but that’s how big companies move sometimes….

So I’m off to learning new keyboard shortcuts (I could use the Eclipse keymap, but I had customized Eclipse, too. It’s easier than I thought to learn new tricks). And I have to say, the performance of IntelliJ is impressive. A couple of my teammates way back at Intuit will no doubt be glad to hear that I finally came around to maven + IntelliJ, not to mention some of my Android DevRel mates. We’ll see how this goes, but so far, I’m impressed.