News

WebStorm 12 Roadmap and EAP

Time flies fast and we are already starting the Early Access Program for the next major WebStorm release. You can download WebStorm 12 EAP, build 144.2608, right now. You can install it side by side with WebStorm 11. No active subscription is required.

While we don’t have that many new features to show you right now, we hope you’ll try out some of the improvements (like support for the new Angular 1.5 Component helper and code insights for Angular 2 bindings), performance fixes for JavaScript and numerous fixes that have already landed in WebStorm 12 EAP.

Also, with this being a perfect time for New Year’s resolutions, we would like to share with you our plans for the next couple of months.

Better coding assistance for JavaScript, ECMAScript and TypeScript

We’re always working on improvements in language support, but this time we want to allocate some extra time to work on refactoring options available for JavaScript, ES6 and TypeScript. And of course, performance is always our top priority: we hope to deliver faster indexing for big JavaScript projects, faster code completion results, and more.

Your CPU snapshots showing any IDE performance issues are always very welcome and appreciated.

Keeping up with the frameworks: React, Angular 1.5 and 2

With so many great frameworks around and already supported in WebStorm, we want to make sure that WebStorm users can get the best coding assistance for them with support for all the latest features. As we see a big (and growing) interest in React in the community and the strong position of Angular, we want to further improve support for these frameworks in WebStorm with more smart features.

There are also some things on our list that had been planned for but unfortunately did not make it into WebStorm 11. We have revised some of the initial ideas and hope to start working on some of them in the nearest future:

Next steps in npm support improvements
WebStorm 11 included npm script integration and some npm-related inspections in code. Now it’s time to add coding assistance for packages and their versions in package.json, and to support various scenarios of managing project Node.js dependencies from the IDE.

Webpack support
While we’ve made WebStorm able to debug apps built with Webpack, we’re still thinking about the best way to support Webpack-specific require statements.

Running and debugging Node.js applications remotely
We’d like to add an option to run Node.js applications remotely from the IDE and debug them. We have already started working on a remote run via SSH on a remote machine and then we plan to enhance the feature with the integration with Docker and Vagrant.

Other things that we are considering and may work on include:

  • Options to run and debug Electron applications
  • support for CSS variables
  • further Flow integration (if it becomes available for Windows)
  • deeper integration with build tools (may be some new workflow that could replace the File watchers), and more.

We want to hear your opinion before deciding which of these features will be implemented in WebStorm. So, our issue tracker is always open for your feature requests (and bug reports). Let us know what you think!

Read about the features and improvements added in the recent WebStorm 12 EAP builds:

  • WebStorm 12 EAP, 144.3600: Support for Git worktrees, updated look and feel of the Git Log, Missing import statement inspection for JavaScript.
  • WebStorm 12 EAP, 144.3357: SSH Console, Extract field refactoring in TypeScript, support for debugging Node.js apps built with Webpack, and more.
  • WebStorm 12 EAP, 144.3143: Unused imports warning, code assistance in tsconfig.json, .babelrc and .eslintrc, remote run and debug for Node.js apps, Vagrant integration, debugging Electron apps, and further improvement in Angular 2 support.
  • WebStorm 12 EAP, 144.2925: Inline rename, smarter auto-imports and Optimize imports action for TypeScript, debugging async client-side code, and improvements in Angular 2 support.

– JetBrains WebStorm Team

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