JetBrains has another magical tool! Fleet, experience the feeling of flying

Introduction

Java development students may be no strangers to JetBrains, because JetBrains claims to have the world's best JAVA development tool IDEA. Indeed IDEA is very easy to use, it satisfies all the dreams of a java developer.

Of course JetBrains also provides development artifacts in other languages, such as PyCharm, PhpStrom, WebStorm and so on. As long as it is related to development work, you can find it in JetBrains' family bucket.

Such a useful artifact is naturally expensive, but JetBrains specially launched a free license version for the student party, which is very user-friendly.

Now JetBrains is preparing to launch an editor Fleet. What exactly does this editor do? What are its advantages? Let's take a look.

From eclipse to Fleet

I still remember that when I first came into contact with Java, I started from the JAVA command line. After writing the code, first use the javac command to compile the code into bytecode, and then use the java command to run. Although java is the second most useful language in the world, this way of manually compiling and running is really a headache.

Then one day, after listening to a classmate's introduction, I discovered the eclipse tool. It was really shocking at the time! It is so powerful, it subverted my perception of IDE.

Of course, I always think that the best IDE is Microsoft's Visual Studio, which is almost all-encompassing. At that time, it was a pity that Visual Studio only supported Microsoft's own C# and .net platforms, so I had no choice but to give up.

eclipse is easy to use and free, plus a wide variety of plug-ins, DIY an IDE that suits your taste is no problem.

So at that time, another hobby besides development was to repeatedly install various plug-ins of eclipse to experience different fun.

Later, in my work, I also used eclipse at the beginning, but as a pure open source project, eclipse also exposed its shortcomings, that is, third-party plug-ins are messy, and there are often bugs of this kind in use.

Then a colleague gave Amway IDEA. To be honest, the first IDEA was ugly, and IDEA organized projects more loosely, more like managing files rather than projects, so I still insist on using eclipse.

So, what caused me to switch from eclipse to IDEA?

Remember, it was summer, and the sky was still blue. I click into the eclipse official website as usual to see if there is the latest version to upgrade.

I didn't report any hope, but the result is really there. This version is eclipse che, which is actually a web version of the development tool, known as the next generation of eclipse.

Is eclipse only available on the web in the future? Is the browser experience as silky as the local development tools?

Although I am very worried, but with the attitude of giving it a try, I still try to install eclipse che according to the official documentation.

The installation process is painful, and the use process is even more painful. I don’t know if it’s the problem with my computer’s subsystem or its documentation is not clearly written. I just couldn’t use eclipse che to develop a project.

The original intention of eclipse che was to move the development environment to the cloud. However, the technology and ideas at that time were a bit too advanced, so I was successfully dissuaded from it.

Then I switched from eclipse to IDEA and carried out many years of development. I never paid attention to the development of eclipse and eclipse che.

When I was writing this article, I went to check it out. It turns out that the local IDE of Eclipse is still there. Its latest version is 2021-12. Eclipse che has also developed to version 7.0 and started to support Kubernetes-Native.

However, everything will not go back to the past.

Now that eclipse is over, let's talk about IDEA again.

To be honest, as a paid software, IDEA is indeed better than eclipse in use. The best java development IDE is not for nothing.

Of course, in order to support such a powerful feature of IDEA, it needs to take up a lot of system memory. IDEA is not a problem at all for 1G-2G.

So are there any lightweight development tools? Of course there is.

The so-called development tools are tools that support the functions of code highlighting and code compilation. Notepad and the like are not mentioned here.

At that time, there were two tools available, one was atom and the other was Microsoft vs code.

Both are lightweight development tools, and both support plug-in extensions. I also used them, and finally chose Microsoft's vs code. Although there is no specific comparison, it feels that Microsoft is more stable and functional.

Now that there is a powerful and concise and lightweight development tool like Microsoft vscode, why does Fleet think that everyone would choose it?

This is a good question. Let's talk carefully.

Characteristics of Fleet

The biggest advantage of Fleet is that it is backed by the big tree of jetbrains. With the blessing of IDEA and other development tools, it is difficult for everyone to believe in the quality of Fleet.

In the words of jetbrains, they spent 20 years of knowledge and experience to write development tools, and the bottom layer of Fleet uses the code processing engine of IntelliJ, so Fleet is credible enough.

Of course, it is not enough to have guarantees. We need to know what features Fleet has.

First look at the main interface of Fleet. It's very simple and beautiful. Comes with git and history.

Fleet supports auto-completion, refactoring, jump, debug and other features that should be supported by the IDE.

Currently Fleet supports JAVA, kotlin, python, go, javaScript, Rust, TypeScript and JSON. Other languages such as PHP, C++, C#, HTML are under development.

Seeing this, we may still have questions. These features seem to be available in other lightweight IDEs, so what are the features of Fleet?

distributed! Yes, it is distributed!

Fleet's architecture is distributed. Fleet doesn't care whether your project is locally, in a container, or in another country thousands of miles away. By providing a virtualized file system, Fleet can handle local and remote projects equally well.

Fleet has three working modes, namely Editor mode, Smart mode, and Distributed mode.

For the editor mode, everything is local, so the functions and features it provides are relatively limited:

In Smart mode, some advanced features can be provided, such as project and context-aware code completion, definition and usage navigation, dynamic code quality checking, and quick fixes. These features cannot be completed by a lightweight Fleet, so additional Language Servers and Code engine are needed to handle them, as shown in the following figure:

What is called Distributed mode? Just put these Language Servers and Code engine on the cloud or in a docker container. The local Fleet can only be used as a client to connect to a remote server:

This kind of distribution can also realize the function of multi-user collaboration.

Personally, Fleet may be an advanced version of eclipse che. Stay tuned.

JetBrains Space

In addition, jetBrains also combines Fleet and JetBrains Space.

You can think of JetBrains Space as a remote working environment, which eliminates the trouble of setting up a local working environment.

Summarize

Fleet is so easy to use, so how to download it? Sorry, Fleet is temporarily unavailable for downloading. You must go to Fleet's official website to apply. I heard that the quota is limited, so act quickly.