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JetBrains, a maker of productivity-enhancing tools for software developers, has announced the release of WebStorm 3.0, a JavaScript integrated development environment.
The WebStorm IDE features CoffeeScript support in 3.0, including navigation, completions, refactoring, error-checking and more to help developers take advantage of brevity and readability of the CoffeeScript, JetBrains officials said. CoffeeScript is a programming language that transcompiles to JavaScript.
WebStorm 3.0 also features integration with the JSLint JavaScript code quality tool to enable new inspections to verify code quality. And the IDE also supports Node.JS for editing and debugging server-side JavaScript.
“JavaScript has become one of today’s most popular languages, and as such deserves proper, full-fledged support in an IDE,” said Alexey Gopachenko, WebStorm project lead, in a statement. “The key thing in an IDE is to enhance developer productivity by offering smart ways to use the latest standards and technologies. By listening to our users, we ensure short, feedback-oriented release cycles so that WebStorm always stays on the cutting edge no matter what new technology comes to the scene.”
Other key new functionality in WebStorm 3.0 includes: JavaScript unit testing with JsTestDriver, Smart Duplicated Code Detector for HTML, CSS and JavaScript, improvements to FTP/SFTP Sync, TFS support and revision graph for GIT, and streamlined UI across all operating systems. Developers can try JetBrains WebStorm 3.0 for a free 30-day evaluation at http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm.
The release of WebStorm 3.0 comes two weeks after the Dec. 6 release of IntelliJ IDEA 11, a regular, yearly update of JetBrains’ IDE for Java Virtual Machine (JVM) based and polyglot development.
With IntelliJ IDEA 11, JetBrains delivers a custom, streamlined user interface along with IDE performance optimizations and numerous adjustments throughout the whole environment, to refine the effectiveness of developers’ typical day-to-day operations, the company said.
“For a product as huge as IntelliJ IDEA, every new feature is like a tiny drop in the ocean,” said Max Shafirov, IntelliJ IDEA project lead, in a statement. “But when users evaluate a tool, it’s not the feature set that wins – it’s the impression the tool leaves at the end of the day. We add great new features in every update, but rethinking the existing features is the better part of the work we do for a major release. IntelliJ IDEA 11, with its brand-new slick UI for all supported platforms, is the best example of a reevaluated user experience, with higher productivity and even more attention to details.”
In addition to a new UI for all platforms, IntelliJ IDEA also offers platform-specific features such as Mac OS X Lion full-screen support and drag-n-drop and symbolic links support on Linux. Also, IntelliJ IDEA 11 brings many improvements for its many integrated tools and frameworks including Spring, Groovy/Grails, AspectJ and others. And the updated IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition gains improvements for Android development, including live preview of Android UI layouts and compatibility with the latest Android 4.0 SDK.
Other key new features in IntelliJ IDEA 11 include: Support for Web development with the Play framework, Groovy 2.0 support with new intention actions and refactorings, Gradle integration, CoffeeScript editor with code assistance, inspections and formatting options, and support for all features of Grails 2.0, Grails web-flow and Spock framework, the company said.
Meanwhile, in between the release of IntelliJ IDEA 11 and WebStorm 3.0, on Dec. 13 JetBrains delivered a new version of its Python development environment, PyCharm 2.0. PyCharm 2.0 is an IDE for Python, Django and Google App Engine.
To address the needs of Python, Web developers who go beyond the standard Django technology stack, PyCharm 2.0 provides advanced code editor features for Mako and Jinja2 template languages. This release also adds support for editing CoffeeScript. Cython support is another addition for developers who use Python in high-performance computing, or for integrating with C libraries.
“People use Python for Web development, scientific computing, desktop software, games and more – the diversity is nothing short of amazing”, said Dmitry Jemerov, PyCharm project lead at JetBrains, in a statement. “To match this diversity and the wide variety of frameworks and technologies in use today, we’re gradually expanding the range of technologies supported in PyCharm. The biggest step in this release is the addition of two new template languages, Mako and Jinja2. At the same time, we’ve strengthened the core Python support through the integration of code coverage, IPython, PyPy and new static code analysis possibilities.”
Besides supporting more technologies, PyCharm 2.0 delivers other new features such as: built-in analysis of code coverage by unit tests; more code inspections such as detection of parameter type mismatch and usages of deprecated modules, classes and functions; a new JavaScript debugger based on Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers; code assistance for internationalizing Django applications; and the ability to open multiple projects inside one IDE window.