Today, the Early Access Program (EAP) has been opened for IntelliJ Idea 10.

There is a lot of changes, here are some of them (the most interesting in my point of view) :

• Faster indexing speed
• Java - Faster method usage search
• Spring Web Services support
• Spring testing support
• New Spring live templates (patterns and frameworks)
• intelligent resources support (smart completion and warnings for resource types)
• Maven Refactorings
• Maven pom.xml editor new features
• Maven Dependencies Diagram
• Discover & download libraries from maven repositories even in plain java projects
• XML editing improvements in IntelliJ IDEA X
• Git support improvements, including 'Git Log' view.
• Mercurial support
• Hibernate Criteria API supported
• JDBC Console UI revised
• Initial support for AspectJ and Spring Roo frameworks
• A lot of other interesting features

To consult the full list of new features, read the release notes. And if you want to test this version, download it here.

When working with a lot of images by example for galleries on a website, it could be really interesting to optimize the images to save a lot of space and directly improve the performances of the website and save some traffic if this is limited by your hosting.

Optimize JPEG images with jpegoptim

A great tool to optimize JPEG images is jpegoptim. It's a simple command line tool available as Ubuntu package. You can install it easily :

sudo apt-get install jpegoptim

And it's also really simple to use. First, to optimize an image without loss :

jpegoptim image.jpg

Or with a loss of max 25% :

jpegoptim --max=75 image.jpg

More informations on the official site.

Optimize PNG, BMP and GIF images with optipng

An other tool to optimize other types of images is optipng. Here again you can install it with apt-get :

sudo apt-get install optipng

It's as easy as the first tool :

optipng image.png

You can also configure the tool to use the best optimization level, but also the slowest :

optipng -o7 image.png

So here we are : You have now enough informations to optimize all you images on Ubuntu. I hope this will be useful to somebody.

A new version of IntelliJ Idea is available : IntelliJ Idea 9.0.3

• A new UI for merging Subversion branches
• A new tool to store encrypted passwords for VCS, proxy server etc.
• A lot of bugfixes, more than 350
• The HTML editor comes with initial support for HTML 5
• The Flex debugger has been improved a lot
• This version supports now Grails 1.3.x
• Several little performance improvements in specific part (XHTML editing by example)

The change notes are available on the site of JetBrains.

You can download it from now and install it manually or just launch Idea and the patch will be downloaded and applied.

Brian Goetz, from Oracle, has posted an updated proposal for the lambda expressions : State of the Lambda

Here are some examples of closures taken from the proposal :

We can use lambda expressions to replace the heavy usage of Single Abstract Method (SAM) interfaces :

public interface CallbackHandler { 
    public void callback(Context c);
}

CallbackHandler cb = { c -> System.out.println("pippo") };

We can make references to methods to use it as SAM interfaces :

class Person { 
    private final String name;
    private final int age;

    public static int compareByAge(Person a, Person b) { ... }
    public static int compareByName(Person a, Person b) { ... }
}

Person[] people = ...

Arrays.sort(people, #Person.compareByAge);