Whatever happened to “La Clojure”? (IntelliJ IDEA’s cojure plugin)
Most of our readership and other clojure lovers come from either the Lisp/Scheme/Haskell world or they come from the Java world. For the former Emacs is usually their weapon of choice, being it very focused on the lispy aspects of Clojure. For the ones that come from Java there are three IDEs that are used most often: Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ IDEA. All of them have now Clojure plugins in various states of development (here, here and here respectively)
La Clojure's website
IntelliJ is regarded as the best Java development tool for much of the Java developers, and it is good enough to have people pay for it (the other two being free.)
Some time ago they started developing a very promising Clojure plugin, dubbed “La Clojure”. For months the development of La Clojure was very fast and the integration with Java was really astounding given the dynamic nature of Clojure.
In its current incarnation, this plugin has some major issues, the most annoying one being its badly broken REPL support. But you would still be able to use its fast code navigation, its nice, smart and well executed Java/Clojure code completion and other goodies that IntelliJ IDEA has spoiled us with.
Its development was fast indeed, at least until last May. Then it stopped completely, at least judging for their public SVN repository. No new versions of the plugin have been published since May 20th 2009, and that makes it almost five months now.
Does any one know what’s going on? Is it a dead project? (I surely hope not)
Well, at least the good news is that Enclojure, the plugin for Netbeans seems to be moving along pretty quickly, and their REPL support is outstanding.
6 Comments to “Whatever happened to “La Clojure”? (IntelliJ IDEA’s cojure plugin)”
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Indeed a bit disappointing. Even grabbing the SVN is troublesome on OS X’s case insensitive file system, due to a duplicated file.
Indeed, building the La Clojure from SVN on OS X is a science project http://www.jetbrains.net/devnet/message/5242764#5242764
There was a brief, somewhat unsatisfactory, mention of La Clojure in the Java Posse interview announcing the open source community edition: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/free_java_ide.html
Hopefully Ilya Sergey or some other people that know Java better than me will get this polished up for the M9 release. That could make for a very nice (free) Java/Clojure IDE for Swing type apps.
Hi all.
I’m really sorry for this long period of silence and La Clojure plugin being stalled. Now we are going to resume developing it and a last version with some fixes is available for IDEA 9 CE in the plugin repository.
Ilya, many thanks for your update. Your plugin has a number of fans here and we’re looking forward playing with the newer versions when they come up.
I’ll try building from the sourcecode today :)
by the way, the new plugin for IntelliJ IDEA 9 can be found here: http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?action=download&id=7299