So in my last post I complained about Eclipse developers’ unwillingness for fixing long standing bugs. Now less than a year ago, I suggested to JetBrains to add a feature to IDEA that can come in handy when you want to quickly setup a project:

Defining Libraries as Maven Coordinates

This enables developers to quickly define libraries as Maven coordinates even in projects that do not use Maven and then IDEA can download the appropriate JAR files for the project from Maven repos.

This can be done either by asking the developer to enter the dependencies in a text field like:

And also by providing a text field for entering additional repositories:

[or] Alternatively, a short form syntax might be used for declaring the coordinates:

Also there should be selectable options for downloading source and JavaDocs for the libraries from Maven as well.

And yes my friends! IDEA gurus do pay attention to their users’ requests. This feature has now been added to IntelliJ IDEA X, the next version of the IDE:

Getting External Libraries Easily

JARs of many frameworks and their dependencies get updated too often now. But you do not want to turn your project into a Maven project just because of this? Then this feature is just for you.

In IntelliJ IDEA 10 you can search for & download libraries with dependencies for any framework published on some public maven repository. Minimum Maven experience is required. Just click ‘Attach Classes from Repository…‘

Now let’s see when they will add my other feature request to IDEA: @SuppressWarnings like feature for HTML elements.

To be fair, the NetBeans team has also fixed all the bugs that I’ve reported to them very quickly. But, Eclipse… no matter how great you are and how great your architecture is, your WTP is sooo buggy and years after Maven’s debut, you still don’t have a rock solid Maven plugin. Shame on you mate!