Hi! It’s good news today for a lot of java, ruby and groovy developers – new version “Maia” (officially v9) was just released by JetBrains with a lot of new features (including faster environment, extensive Java 6 support, build-in Google App Engine and Grails projects support etc) – feel read full “What’s new” list.

There exists also not so good news – this time for PHP developers – support of PHP was removed from release of free (”community”) version of IDEA, so developers can stick with other completely free IDEs this time – for example NetBeans comes to my mind this time… as alternative… but after Oracle buy Sun, I not sure it is right choice… but this is “idea” for another post…)

Actually personally I don’t understand why “Community” version does not support PHP, Javascript, Python or Ruby as this languages are used by a lot (if not most) of “open source” developers that for some reasons does not feet into JetBrains licensing of commercial version of IntelliJ IDEA for open source projects. I think “vice versa” if compare to JetBrains – Commercial version must have extended support for Java development, while Community edition must support MORE other open source frameworks / languages, like Ruby, Python or PHP etc. Sure it’s only my “personal” opinion, but I think most of developers will agree with me – people that use IDEA for Java development (usually in enterprises) can (and will!) simply BUY commercial licenses, while a lot of potential IntelliJ users actually want to use it for small open source projects in non-Java languages stack and want to get IDE for FREE!

But totally – all new features show that JetBrains go in right direction – support for most “progressive” and “latest” technologies in IDEA (even if it is available only commercially )

Keep it going, JetBrains!

Because I build some projects with support of Cloud deployment scenarios (currently for Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure) and I am sure that best Web software must be ready to be deployed in Cloud(s), it was very interesting to read latest announcement from Amazon: “… AWS Software Development Kit (SDK) for .NET Now Available… “.

Sure it’s just a beginning for Amazon in development of real .NET SDK, but even with this version we can quickly build .NET applications that tap into AWS Cloud.   Yes,  even before developers have good libraries to build such applications, but now looks like we have first “standard” API from Amazon and this fact is very important!

For example, for Ruby there is no such official SDK (or Ruby gem), and developers can choice from few available gems (right_aws, amazon-ec2 or AWS:S3 to name just few).  The same situation for Java - available a lot of “community” libraries, but no official SDK… (ok, ok, for Java we have at least official AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, but Toolkit it is not SDK!!!).

But why it is important to have official “language specific” SDK?

Well, first of all, now because Amazon have few BIG rivals, like Google App Engine (and we know that Google DO have official SDKs, more so, for both Python and Java!) and Microsoft Azure (sure Microsoft always have SDKs – it a BIG plus for Microsoft!).

Also it is important for developers, so they know that if they take some library and put this library as “base” for communications with a Cloud, they will not need to dial with changes in API in case of library author decide to drop development! It is important to have SDK that will be up to date with company services (Amazon in our case), just because we developers want to be SAFE! Sure it is good if there are a lot of open source libraries that EXTEND SDK some way, but it’s just “add-ons” and can’t replace real official SDK!

So it is really BIG day for Amazon and .NET developers – first official “language specific” SDK, and for .NET!!! What will be answer from Microsoft Azure that is still in “Beta”?

Note: in this post I mean “language specific” SDK, not just common SDK that list API for Web Services  with samples how to use them for example, etc… Because most of they time developers dial with some specific language, it is important for services like AWS to provide language specific SDKs so developers can really quickly and “safely” create applications using such “language specific” SDKs! Hope you understand what I mean