What’s New in Intellij Idea 2016.2 for Spring Developers

If you’re a heavy user of Spring and IntelliJ IDEA, you’ll find the IntelliJ IDEA 2016.2 update very interesting. Besides many important bugfixes, the update adds support for Spring 4.3 and Spring Security 4.0 features and cache abstraction, improves support for Spring MVC, and further tunes performance. Before reading about this in more detail, make sure you’ve registered for our webinar dedicated to the new release and Spring framework.

OK, now back to the update. First of all, the IDE now supports generics types as qualifiers and provides navigation for them:

Also, the IDE now supports custom @EventListener annotations defined with @AliasFor and enables coding assistance for editing SpEL:

The new inspection helps replace field injection with constructor injection:

The IDE now supports Spring Cache abstraction: CacheResolver, CacheManager, KeyGenerator, @Cachable, @PutCache, @EvictCache, etc. This includes code completion, navigation, inspections, and syntax highlighting.

The icon on the gutter (the narrow panel on the right-hand side of the editor) lets you navigate to other methods annotated with cache operations related to the same name:

A dedicated inspection checks if a cache name is provided for all cache-related operations:

If you use a @Cachable annotation on an interface or, for example, put @Cachable and @CachePut on the same method, you’ll see a warning.

And of course, the IDE provides coding assistance for editing SpEl:

In FreeMarker and Velocity templates, you’ll get code completion and navigation for variables defined in Spring MVC controllers:

Also, the update has supported the changes introduced with Spring Security 4.0 and added code completion and navigation for SpEl in annotations and inside XML:

And last but not least, we’ve added highlighting and navigation for Spring-related messages in Console.

Found this interesting? Download the update and give it a try right away.

P.S. Oh, and we’re going to SpringOne Platform event in the beautiful Las Vegas. If you also plan to attend, come and listen to the Tips and Tricks for Spring in IntelliJ IDEA talk, by Yann Cébron and Stéphane Nicoll!

Develop with Pleasure!