Jetbrains just released Idea 8. The new release brings a bunch of new features but I am actually interested in two main areas that the previous versions of IDEA wasn’t really addressing: Maven support and performance with projects with more than 4 modules and lots of classes. I must say that working with big codebase is quite a nightmare with IDEA.

Hopefully, the new release brings a nice update on the Maven support. So far, I’ve been able to use all my projects quite easily with it (I am using the EAP releases for a long time now). Regarding performance, there’s still work to do. There’s an must-have  configuration item that you need to configure if you are running Maven projects. Go to Settings and choose File Settings in the IDE options. In that screen there is a field called Ignore files and folders. Just add target; in front of the list of files. This will avoid IDEA to blow up the I/Os every time you’re doing a complete rebuild for instance. This simple settings really boosted the performance and make IDEA enjoyable to use.