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Comment by brianm | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, it is a fairly crippled version. It looks like they open sourced the basic framework and some core modules, but keep the important ones behind the $600 barrier. This may actually backfire as folk's willingness to pay $600 for JSP debugging is questionable.

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It doesn't look too crippled to me. The features I personally would be missing are HTML, JS, CSS, Servlets, and JSPs.

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/editions_compariso...

Google App Engine is not supported in the free version.

Nor is GWT, unfortunately. Then again, it's only $600 to get these features vs over a grand previously.

The JEE application servers are not supported either. But his is not a big issue, since one can always start the app server outside IDEA and still be able to debug it with the Community edition.

So is it crippled or is it a bad business move because it's not crippled enough?

Can't it be both at once?

It does everything I want now (for Scala). If their product is good enough (compared to Eclipse, Netbeans, and Emacs) then if I later decide I want the extra features, there's a chance I'll pay them.

From the comparison matrix it appears to be missing quite a bit. Since it is open source though, I don't see a reason why someone can't develop the missing feature(s) that they need. Then again you have to value your time at something. Buying a license may be cheaper in the long run.

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