General musings on programming languages, and Java.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

IDEA 7 - A Release Too Early?

I downloaded the new IDEA 7 release today, and pondered buying the upgrade licence, but went with the 30 day trial first. Here's a little video I made of an editing bug that I noticed immediately.

(If anybody can figure out how to get a .swf into a blogger page, please tell me how. Blogger just mangled any HTML I used to do it.)

Another niggle is that, including the milestone releases, the inspections that use @Nullable and @NotNull seem not to be present, and with no mention of why. Hopefully they're now just in some plugin that I don't happen to have installed. That's a bit of a show-stopper for me, I changed my coding style to use those annotations. I'd have to convert to FindBugs' equivalent to continue using that coding style.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you ever tried at least to search "@Nullable" in built-in
help?

I mean *really*, do you *really* suppose that @Nullable is broken in all milestones and even in release? An nobody found that?

About completion "bug" - if you can reproduce this so that you able to record it - isn't the right place to write it the JetBrains JIRA?

I wonder how such silly things ever come to Java blogs top read entries. Good headline I suppose.

Ricky Clarkson said...

I searched for it in Google. Built-in help is for unusable programs.

As it happens, after your prompt, I've checked the built-in help, and the pictures in the help aren't even present (little boxes with red crosses in them). Very polished. It also doesn't actually answer my question.

I asked a number of other developers, but I couldn't find another person who actually uses @NotNull. Can you confirm that, say, @NotNull String x=null; gives a warning/error on your system? And what message it gives.

About adding it to JIRA, I have every intention of doing so.

Anonymous said...

To get @NotNull/@Nullable warnings, you need to:
* Have the "annotations.jar" in your classpath
* Enable the "Constant Conditions & exceptions" inspection. (I'm not sure if it's enabled by default)

If those conditions are met, you'll indeed get a warning for the statement you quoted.

The warning given is: "null is assigned to a variable that is annotated with @NotNull"

Adding a JIRA ticket for your completion bug is a good idea. I haven't experienced the behavior you describe during 6 months of IDEA 7.0 milestones usage.

But if it's reproducible, a fix is usually made within a few days. (Although it might take some time before 7.0.1 is actually released)

Ricky Clarkson said...

I've met both those conditions, but to no avail. The inspections work fine in IDEA 6 for me.

I'll try afresh on another computer sometime.

One point I should note about the video is that there was a pause in editing responsiveness just before the 'texts' appeared. Looks like a race condition, which is probably why it hasn't happened to you, and doesn't happen every time for me.

Thanks for your input.

Anonymous said...

Ricky,

Please create two JIRA tickets for the problems you experienced: http://www.jetbrains.net/jira/

Thanks

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A salsa dancing, DJing programmer from Manchester, England.