Cleaning up tags on GitHub

Posted on November 9, 2018 by Matt Ellis

Since we started development on IDEA, every nightly build of each IntelliJ-based IDE was tagged in the intellij-community repository on GitHub. After 18 years of development and having 10 products, we now have more than 68,000 tags in the repository! This many tags causes performance issues with git, in particular, every git fetch is very slow.

To improve the experience of working with the intellij-community repository, both for us and for our contributors, we have removed these tags. We’re currently deciding on whether they are needed on GitHub and what our tagging strategy will be going forward.

If you need a specific tag that isn’t available in the  intellij-community repo on GitHub (e.g. for an EAP, a release version or a different product) you can still find it in the git mirror on git.jetbrains.org which will be keeping all of the tags. For convenience, a couple of scripts were added to the project to work with the mirror – one to fetch a single tag by name, and another to list all tags.

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Updated guidance for module JARs in IntelliJ based IDEs

Posted on October 11, 2018 by Matt Ellis

When building an IntelliJ based IDE, we’ve historically packed class files from implementation modules into a single big JAR. For example, for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate this was idea.jar. However most of the classes in that JAR were IntelliJ Platform classes which are included in all IntelliJ-based IDEs. In IntelliJ IDEA 2018.1 we extracted such common classes to a separate platform-impl.jar file. Similarly, we extracted common platform API classes from openapi.jar to  platform-api.jar. This can help to decrease build and startup time for the IDE, and also makes layout of different IDEs more consistent.

Now we’re recommending that you do the same for your own IntelliJ-based IDEs. The change is rather simple, when listing the modules using the ProductModulesLayout class, you should now list only your product specific API and implementation modules, using the new  productApiModules and productImplementationModules properties (note the prefix is product!).

The platfromApiModules and platformImplementationModules properties you would have been using previously are now deprecated, and should be left unassigned, in which case the default behaviour is to pack the modules listed in CommunityRepositoryModules#PLATFORM_API_MODULES into platform-api.jar, and CommunityRepositoryModules#PLATFORM_IMPLEMENTATION_MODULES into platform-imp.jar. You can read more details in the javadocs for ProductModulesLayout.

You can see how straightforward the change is by taking a look at how it was done for PyCharm Edu in this commit.

 

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Introducing JetBrains Marketplace

Posted on September 7, 2018 by Mikhail Vink

Today we are delighted to share something with you which has been in the works for quite some time and has come about because of earlier requests from some of you. We are also seeing a growing interest in this opportunity from IntelliJ Platform plugin developers.

Meet JetBrains Marketplace, a new platform and an evolution of the plugins repository which turns it into a marketplace for third-party plugin developers to sell their plugins and take advantage of an out-of-the-box licensing and billing solution provided by JetBrains.

marketplace_social

The Early Access Program is already available, and we are ready to start the technical testing of a few third-party plugins that are ready to switch to the Marketplace in the nearest future.

Marketplace provides:

  • Out-of-the-box software licensing solution
    Integrated with the JetBrains infrastructure, our licensing solution provides your plugins with the same level of licensing support that our JetBrains products already enjoy. Things like generation of licenses for end-users, support for evaluation licenses, centralized license administration, and management via JetBrains Account, as well as an on-premises license server, licenses protection, in-product licensing module, and more, are all taken care of.
  • Billing and sales infrastructure
    With JetBrains Marketplace, third-party plugin vendors can outsource their entire billing and sales operations to JetBrains, and we will take care of the checkout and payment processing, quotes, invoices, refunds, community programs, discounts, and even sales support for your plugins. In addition, we will utilize our extensive reseller network to make plugins available for purchase via the JetBrains distribution network (which is very important for some markets where direct sales possibilities are limited).
  • Marketing and sales support
    Through the Marketplace, you have the opportunity to promote your plugin to millions of people that use JetBrains products. Our team will be working together with paid plugins vendors on the Marketplace to make sure that the plugin is well suited to the target audience, and we’ll assist you with positioning, promotion, and various marketing and sales activities beneficial to our end-users and plugin vendors.

The Marketplace is now available for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, AppCode, CLion, DataGrip, GoLand, PhpStorm, PyCharm Professional, Rider, RubyMine, and WebStorm.

Support for Community Editions / Educational Editions of IntelliJ IDEA-based IDEs, as well as other JetBrains tools (such as .NET and Team Tools), will come later.

Similar to other marketplaces and app stores, we will apply a revenue-sharing model to the JetBrains Marketplace. This means that JetBrains will take a moderate commission from all plugin sales made via the Marketplace to make sure that the model is sustainable and we are able to re-invest into the plugin development ecosystem in the future.

For the full terms and conditions of the Marketplace and more details on the technical solution, we invite you to apply to the already ongoing Marketplace Early Access Program.

Should you have any questions, feel free to write to us at marketplace@jetbrains.com or post a comment below.

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Plugins Repository now integrates with the Plugin Verification tool

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Florin Pățan

As our plugin eco-system grows, we want to give developers the same experience they have come to expect from our IDEs. Today we are happy to announce the integration of the Plugin Verifier tool for the Plugins Repository. This will allow you to check the binary compatibility between the IntelliJ IDEA‑based IDE builds and the IntelliJ Platform plugins as you upload them.

This tool is useful as it allows authors to check the plugins against a specified range of [since : until] builds for the platform, and not just against the current version of their editor. This process is needed as sometimes the IntelliJ API changes between releases. In turn, these changes might lead to binary incompatibilities between the plugin and the target platform, and so lead to NoClassDefFoundError, NoSuchMethodError, and similar exceptions at runtime.

With the recent update of the Plugins Repository, you can see the results of the plugin verification for each update of an IntelliJ Platform plugin which has been uploaded to the Plugins Repository.

The results of the verification are available in the Update Details View.
This is how it looks for one of the latest Scala plugin updates:

Scala plugin verification results

You can view the compatibility report and dive into the technical information about all the issues found.

In addition to this, you can schedule verification for a particular IDE build.

Please report all the bugs and feature requests to the Plugins Repository YouTrack Project.

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Legal news: plugin license is required for all plugins

Posted on May 30, 2018 by Mikhail Vink

With the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) coming into action last week, in addition to some of the compliance-related changes which were introduced earlier, there has been a change to the way plugins and their updates are uploaded to the plugins repository.

From May 24, 2018, it is a requirement to specify a valid license URL for your plugins. Please provide a valid license URL for your plugins at your earliest convenience.

  • A License URL for new plugins should be provided on the upload form.
  • For existing plugins, it is not possible to upload a new update to the plugin unless the License URL is provided on the Edit Plugin page. If you are using an API to upload the plugin update and the license is not specified, an error will be returned until the License URL is provided in the plugins repository interface.

license_upload_form

The owner or creator of the plugin decides what EULA (end-user license agreement) should apply to the plugin and its updates. Unfortunately, JetBrains can’t tell you what your plugin’s Developer EULA should say because it will largely depend on your choice of how to license the plugin, and how to use personal data, etc. However, we can give you some pointers, e.g., Open Source licenses and various independent EULA generators (not affiliated with JetBrains).

Should you have any questions, please ask them to us here in the comments, post them to @JBPlatform Twitter, or drop us an email at plugins-admin@jetbrains.com.

Posted in IntelliJ Platform, Plugin Repository, TeamCity Platform | Tagged , | 1 Comment

JetBrains Hub now used for authentication in the plugin repository

Posted on April 27, 2018 by Mikhail Vink

icon_HubAs of today’s release, JetBrains Hub is used for a unified authentication in the JetBrains plugin repository. Hub is our user and team management solution that we utilize internally, and now it serves as a user and permission model for the plugin repository.

We have moved from the direct authentication and accessing user profiles via JBA (JetBrains Account) in order to provide seamless integration with other JetBrains tools that are already using Hub for authentication. In addition, we will be able to build some exciting features in the nearest future relying on the already available Hub functionality, such as API auth via tokens, groups of users, etc.

A new authentication method is already live on plugins.jetbrains.com, and we don’t expect any issues on your side, as it is connected to the previously connected authentication method.

Should you have any issues with accessing your plugins or comments, please make sure that you have your JBA (JetBrains Account) connected to the Hub Account in the Hub interface.

If you encounter any issues, do send them to us here in comments, post to @JBPlatform Twitter, or drop us an email at plugins-admin@jetbrains.com.

JetBrains Hub is available as a product, too. Here’s where you can learn more about Hub.

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New Code Style API in Intellij IDEA 2018.1

Posted on February 6, 2018 by Matt Ellis

IntelliJ 2018.1 introduces a new API that we want to make plugin authors aware of. We’re changing the way you retrieve Code Style settings (such as formatting options) so that you can provide a PsiFile, instead of a Project. The ultimate goal is to support different code style settings per scope, rather than per project (see IDEA-69685).

As a bonus, the new API provides a shorter form for getting code style. So, for example, instead of writing CodeStyleSettings.getSettings(project).getCommonSettings(language) you can now simply write CodeStyle.getLanguageSettings(file).

Continue reading →

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The great module rename in the IntelliJ IDEA codebase

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Nikolay Chashnikov

We’ve just pushed a major naming change to the IntelliJ codebase. For years, we hadn’t set or followed any naming conventions for modules in the IntelliJ IDEA source, and things had gotten into a total mess (for example, we had a variety of names such as  hg4idea, jetgroovy, ByteCodeViewer, testng_rt, and lang-impl). As usage of IntelliJ Platform grows, this has been causing more and more problems.

So now we’ve finally put all names of modules in IntelliJ IDEA and IntelliJ Platform sources in order. This means that all 357 modules in the intellij-community project have been renamed.

This doesn’t affect binary distributions of IntelliJ-based IDEs, as JAR filenames haven’t been changed.

Continue reading →

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SVNKit library is removed from the platform

Posted on January 17, 2018 by Dmitriy Smirnov

IntelliJ 2018.1 removes the support of svn integration via SVNKit. The library is also removed from the platform dependencies and is no longer available for plugins. Now a command-line svn client is the only way to integrate with svn and execute svn-commands.

We made our best to maintain compatibility, however, some breakages could not be avoided. API changes are described at http://www.jetbrains.org/intellij/sdk/docs/reference_guide/api_changes_list.html

Here is the list of the affected plugins known to us (plugins from the Plugin repository):

SVN Revision Graph https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/6178-svn-revision-graph
SourceFinder https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7130-sourcefinder
VCS Revision Graph https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/1832-vcs-revision-graph
CollabNet Tools https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7116-collabnet-tools
Review board https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7872-review-board
HP ALI https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/6930-hp-ali
Test Recorder https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9394-test-recorder
SVNToolBox https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7321-svntoolbox
z2-environment https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7470-z2-environment
Review board plugin for IntelliJ idea https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10241-review-board-plugin-for-intellij-idea

We notified authors and sent pull requests with required changes for the plugins, but it could happen there are some plugins outside the repository which rely on SVNKit. If you own such, please update accordingly.

SVNKit was removed due to several reasons, mainly because it is only used to work with old svn 1.6 working copy format, thus bringing a little value to our users.

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Plugin Downloads Statistics: recent changes

Posted on January 11, 2018 by Mikhail Vink

The Plugins Repository serves more than 200,000 downloads of plugins every 24 hours, which can easily double or triple during the major releases. It was starting to become quite a challenge for us to keep, process and display all the data since 2012, which is when we started counting downloads continuously and keeping all the history.

As the IntelliJ Platform matured, the number of plugins and their downloads drastically increased. Our old statistics mechanism (keeping everything on the Plugins Repository web application side in a MySQL database) started failing us, and there were some drawbacks in the user interface and the calculations, as well as some performance issues.

As an effort to improve the experience, we have completely reworked the way we handle plugin downloads statistics. The major changes included:

  • Using CDN access logs as the data source instead of an application-side event;
  • Shifting ownership of the data to the internal JetBrains statistics team;
  • Updating the user interface.

Continue reading →

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