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fantastic news that the core of intellij is being open sourced!

nothing to get excited in it

This is wonderful news and super smart of Jetbrains. I still need the commercial version but this is really going to open IDEA up to a wider audience.

I've been waiting for ages for something like this to happen. I'm totally switching back from Eclipse to IntelliJ, the IDE I started my career with.

Can you really switch to the community edition for real work with all those missing features?

If you need to program Swing, Spring and Java5 it'll be more than enough. Maybe that's not considered real work by some, but not in my book.

Most Swing apps I see act as clients to some web service. So was wondering how you'd handle the service part. But open sourcing of IDEA is nice indeed as you can see from my vote! :)

You could do that using Axis2 and there's even a plugin to help: http://ws.apache.org/axis2/tools/1_1/idea/Idea_plug-in_userguide.html

Well AFAIK Axis still needs a servlet container to run the services and IDEA CE doesn't seem to support them. Anyway good that CE's features all that you need. Unfortunately it is insufficient for many of us. :(

It does need a servlet container to run, but so does JAX-WS and I don't really use the IDE server integration anyway since I can do the same using Maven, Ant or the command line. I can understand that most users would want to have all the bells and whistles (JSP debugging is one that I'd miss), but in the six years that I've been working with Eclipse now, I've really missed IntelliJ, the IDE I used for a year before I had to start using Eclipse (boss won't provide a license).

I'm an Eclipse developer through and through. I am very productive in it and it works very well for my needs. However, if you're needs (or preferences) are different than mine, that's ok. If Intellij makes you more productive, then that's awesome!

For your boss not to pay for a license for a product that makes you more productive, that's just absurd. This is a sad state of the software industry right now. Penny rich, pound pour. How much did your boss save by not buying you a license. Now, what if that tool improved your productivity by even 10 minutes every day. Over the past 5 years you would have added 10,000 minutes of productivity. I'm pretty sure that's worth the few hundred bucks.

Well I've been programming in Eclipse too now for the last 5 years and all in all it is a great IDE, certainly if you take into account the whole plugin ecosystem. But to me at least it seems that Eclipse took longer to get to the level where IntelliJ already was a couple of years ago. I'd say that at the moment they're almost equivalent and it's a personal preference which one you like to use.

I also think it's strange for a boss not to provide his developers with the tools they're most comfortable with, but it seems that in that department every penny counts. Certainly for IntelliJ this is weird since it costs almost nothing compared to other programs. But I've got the same opinion regarding hardware: why try to save money on that. Just provide your developers every 2 years with the newest state of the art hardware, it'll show in their productivity. I had to complain for several months to get a quicker laptop, but it was certainly worth it since the same build/deploy took me 7 minutes, but my colleague only 30 seconds. If you have to do that 30+ times a day, the lost time will quickly be worth the same as a new laptop.