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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 to code with the Eclipse, Netbeans, ADT tool (For android development on Eclipse), Text editors and others tools, I thought to myself:

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

So, after some time with a hard time with these tools I had the opportunity to try Intellij Idea working with Java development.

I must be honest to say that at first, I found the IDEA IDE a little complicated, but because it was seemed to be years apart from everything that had worked with. When I got how to work with this tool, I really loved everything on it.

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

On this article I will talk a little about the Android Studio IDE and Intellij IDEA platform.

The Android Studio IDE is based on a development environment called IntelliJ IDEA.

The IntelliJ IDEA IDE

The IDEA is a leading Java IDE that’s published by a company named JetBrains. It’s available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and can be downloaded from jetbrains.com/idea link. The IntelliJ IDEA is build mainly from 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 consul 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 from 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 on this month, as with IntelliJ IDEA community edition Android Studio is completely free and it can be downloaded from developer.android.com/sdk link.

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, so, 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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