IntelliJ IDEA is an integrated development environment (IDE) written in Java for developing computer software written in Java, Kotlin, Groovy, and other JVM-based languages. It is developed by JetBrains (formerly known as IntelliJ) and is available as an Apache 2 Licensed community edition, and in a proprietary commercial edition. Both can be used for commercial development.
The first version of IntelliJ IDEA was released in January 2001 and was one of the first available Java IDEs with advanced code navigation and code refactoring capabilities integrated.
In 2009, JetBrains released the source code for IntelliJ IDEA under the open-source Apache License 2.0. JetBrains also began distributing a limited version of IntelliJ IDEA consisting of open-source features under the moniker Community Edition. The commercial Ultimate Edition provides additional features and remains available for a fee.
In a 2010 InfoWorld report, IntelliJ received the highest test center score out of the four top Java programming tools: Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans and JDeveloper.
In December 2014, Google announced version 1.0 of Android Studio, an open-source IDE for Android apps, based on the open source community edition. Other development environments based on IntelliJ's framework include AppCode, CLion, DataGrip, GoLand, PhpStorm, PyCharm, Rider, RubyMine, WebStorm, and MPS.
The IDE provides certain features like code completion by analyzing the context, code navigation which allows jumping to a class or declaration in the code directly, code refactoring, code debugging
linting and options to fix inconsistencies via suggestions.
The IDE provides integration with build/packaging tools like Grunt, bower, Gradle, and sbt. It supports version control systems like Git, Mercurial, Perforce, and Subversion. Databases like Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and MySQL can be accessed directly from the IDE in the Ultimate edition, through an embedded version of DataGrip, another IDE developed by JetBrains.