29 Jan
2010

JetBrains Web IDE

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As I already mentioned in a previous blog post, I?m kind of (re-)learning HTML and CSS. The best way for me to pick things up again is by getting my hands dirty and work myself through a simple example. So I decided to work on some sort of prototype of a web application without using any web framework like ASP.NET MVC, Fubu MVC, Ruby on Rails, etc. ? Just plain old HTML and CSS, like the Internet gods intended. I also didn?t want to suck all the fun out of it either, so I decided to use Web IDE from JetBrains as my IDE for churning out this prototype.

I must say that I was pleasantly surprised by some of the features that this IDE has to offer. The first and most obvious one is probably intellisense that just works as expected.

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Also notice the on-the-fly code inspection (colored marker bar on the right) that should be familiar when you?re a Resharper addict like me. Web IDE provides W3C XHTML/CSS validation while working in the editor which is really useful.

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Being the uncertain type, it was also nice to see all the familiar refactoring features from Resharper being available as well. Renaming a class or id is just a breeze. All the corresponding HTML or CSS files are consistently updated.

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Navigation is there as well (CTRL-N and CTRL-SHIFT-N).

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This looks just like Resharper for web developers, but there?s more. At first, I had all the HTML and CSS files including all the image file in the root folder of the project. I wanted to divide and conquer by putting the images and CSS files into their own separate folder. As I prepared myself to change all the references in the HTML files, Web IDE did that all for me when I dragged the files to their final destination. Now I didn?t had to go over all the HTML files and manually change the links. How cool is that!

Web IDE also provides source-control integration Subversion, Git, Perforce, etc ? and that?s just the tip of the iceberg. While working on the prototype of the web application, I mostly focused on the layout and not so much on the behavior so I didn?t use much of the JavaScript capabilities. But I was told that it is comparable with the JavaScript features in RubyMine as described by Peter in this blog post. This is something that I?m going to explore when I start learning more about JavaScript :-).

Although being the first version and still in beta, the IDE seems pretty stable and I couldn?t notice any performance hiccups so far (which cannot be said for all IDE?s these days).

I do hope that there will be some support for ASP.NET or other view engines like Spark, NVelocity, etc. ? in future versions. In fact, I still silently wish that JetBrains would come up with an IDE for .NET. Being realistic about it, I don?t have high hopes for something like that coming out but it would totally rock if they decided to build one. Sweet dreams 🙂

Bottom line, when you?re doing web development in Visual Studio, make sure to also check out Web IDE. It will probably help you to become more productive along the way.

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