Play 2.0 with Intellij

After upgrading to Windows 8, I noticed some stability issues with Eclipse Juno. Many of the problems made Juno completely unusable on my installation.

---

While downloading the older version of Eclipse (Indigo), I decided to also give Idea Intelij community edition a try.

Setup the project

Setting up the project is really easy with the "play" command.

Simply add the play framework to your $PATH or %PATH% (as you probably already have) and type: play idea in your project folder. This should create an Intelij project that you can later import.

Download Intelij

Download the community edition of Intelij from here: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/

Setup Scala Support

Scala Plugin

The Scala plugin can be installed by clicking File->Settings->Plugins->"Browse Repositories...". After the installation of this plugin, everything should be ready for developing your Play 2.0 Scala application.

Play 2.0 Plugin (Not recommended)

There is a Play 2.0 plugin for Intelij that has nightly builds here:

http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/SCA/Play+2.0+plugin+Nightly+Builds+for+Leda

It is still in the early stages of development.

What I noticed

I noticed the Scala support is very stable and auto complete works more often than not. The IDE seems a lot more cohesive and easier to use than Eclipse. The UI is well thought out.

Performance on my desktop machine is where Intelij is not the best. I changed some of the theming options and disabled unneeded plugins. Fortunately that fixed many of the performance issues, but it's not as fast as Eclipse Juno. This is not a big deal though, because the rest of the IDE makes up for it.

Overall, I'm happy with Intelij and will begin to consider using it more often in other projects.