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Android Studio and IntelliJ IDEA

Posted on · Tagged in android, idea, mobile

I personally love the JetBrains tools.

When I started coding with Eclipse, NetBeans, ADT (for Android development on Eclipse), text editors, and other tools, I thought to myself:

“The development with these tools is pretty cool, but the tools are very far from being awesome. Can they be better?”

After struggling with these tools for a while, I had the opportunity to try IntelliJ IDEA for Java development.

I must be honest: at first, I found the IDEA IDE a little complicated because it seemed years ahead of everything I had worked with before. But once I got the hang of it, I really loved everything about it.

Now, after some time working with code, I’ve worked with almost all of JetBrains' technologies like PyCharm, RubyMine, WebStorm, PHPStorm, DataGrip, YouTrack, and so on, and I really loved all of them.

In this article, I will talk a little about the Android Studio IDE and IntelliJ IDEA platform.

The IntelliJ IDEA IDE

The IDEA is a leading Java IDE published by a company named JetBrains. It’s available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and can be downloaded from jetbrains.com/idea. IntelliJ IDEA is built mainly for Java development.

There are two editions: the Community Edition is completely free and includes everything you need to do basic Java programming. With this version, you can build everything from console to web-based applications.

But there’s also a more advanced: the Ultimate Edition that adds a lot more tools. There are tools for coding in JavaScript, for working with Java Enterprise Edition web applications, and for working with databases. IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate requires a paid license. You can find out more about that version on the JetBrains website.

You can also find a comparison on the JetBrains website for these two IDEA editions.

Android Studio and the IDEA Platform

Android Studio, though, is based on the IDEA Community Edition.

Android Studio was first announced at the Google I/O conference in May of 2013, and after a year and a half of public testing, it was released as a 1.0 product in December 2014.

Android Studio 2.0 was in public beta testing this month. Like IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, Android Studio is completely free and can be downloaded from developer.android.com/sdk.

If you’ve been working with Android for a little while, you might have previously used Eclipse.

Android Studio is Google’s second IDE for Android development. The original development environment, the Android Developer Tools plugin for Eclipse (ADT), is no longer in development.

The ADT plugin can’t even be easily downloaded from the Android Developer website, so if you haven’t already switched over from Eclipse, it’s definitely time to do so now.

Whether you’re creating new Android apps or moving existing projects into Android Studio, learning as much as you can about IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio will help make you a faster, more efficient Android Developer.

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