During the massive end-of-days sale, I bought a copy of IntelliJ. I have been primarily a NetBeans developer, but I have used IntelliJ at a previous job. So two of the things that irritated me have been: the inconsistent build support and IntelliJ’s handling of Java GUIs.

IntelliJ has its own internal build system. However, it also has support for Maven. When you have a Maven project, it adds in dependencies to the Maven file, but continues to build with its internal build manager. If you need to add a dependency, IntelliJ will automatically add the dependency in the POM file, but you have to manually add it in its own build manager. Given this inconsistency, it is possible to have two different build configurations within the same project.

Additionally, converting a project from a Netbeans based project with a GUI doesn’t work in IntelliJ. IntelliJ will not interpret the Swing code generated by Netbeans. This means that for anything GUI related, I will have to use Netbeans.

What would be nice?

Support a non-proprietary build system. NetBeans defaults to ANT, and can support Maven natively. If this is not an option, then write an adapter for Maven/ANT/Gradle.

GUI: Reuse the Mattese code. Make Mattise a plugin and write an adaptor for IntelliJ.