Guy Mahieu’s Blog

At my current job everyone is using eclipse and ivy is the standard dependency manager. I’ve used eclipse as well for the last months, but it could never make me forget IntelliJ IDEA. Too bad IntelliJ still lacks ivy support though…

There are a few plugins around that add (some) ivy support to IntelliJ IDEA but I wasn’t able to get them to work properly; they seem to be written for a specific situation or are a pain to configure.

All of this got me to the point where I started working on my own plugin: IvyIDEA. At first I started out with a quick and dirty way of adding dependencies from a certain folder into a module library in IntelliJ. After a few days and nights of development, I now have it integrated with the ivy resolve functionality. It detects source and document types and adds them as such. As a bonus (and because I was curious how it worked) I also added an IvyIDEA facet in intellij, meaning that ivy.xml files are autodetected and configured to be recognized by the plugin.

It is still very rough around the edges (the exception handling is non-existing and there currently is no output console to see what’s going on during the resolve process) but I use it daily in my job and I hope to have a good enough version ready soon to add to the IntelliJ plugin repository.

If you can’t wait until then, you can always download the source code and compile it on your own from www.ivyidea.org. If you have feature requests, bug reports or comments, please let me know!

Update 2008-10-19: I just saw that JetBrains is organizing an IntelliJ plugin contest, and I decided to submit IvyIDEA as an entry. They suggested to publish a version as early as possible so I decided to already publish a first alpha version to the plugin repository. This means that you can now install the first rough-around-the-edges alpha version using the plugin manager in IntelliJ if you like.

About a year and a half ago, we started working on a project to implement a new kind of visualisation method for my current employer, Johnson & Johnson.The goal was to visualize very wide sets of data in a very condensed way to simplify the analysis process. Trevor Howe came up with the concept of a pie barchart diagram he named VlaaiVis (see image on the right). The basic idea is that you can define a ‘preferred profile’, the boundaries within which the data values are satisfactory to you, and the data will be visualized relative to this profile. Every row in the dataset is a pie, and the closer a bar is to the outer rim, the better the value for that column fits your profile.

The other members of the development team for this project were Max Hillaert, Alain Hufkens, Raf Franco and Gabriel Lozano-Moràn. Pieter Vugts and Christophe De Baene created the initial proof-of-concept application.

The department recently decided to make the application publicly available, and the website has gone public now.

From the VlaaiVis website:

VlaaiVis is a visualisation tool originally developed for multifactorial structure activity relationship (SAR) data. Each circle represents a single compound and each slice of the ‘pie’ represents a normalised response to a particular assay or property. An unlimited number of compounds may be visualised simultaneously. The tool seeks to provide a simple and rapid visualisation of single or multiple compounds during any phase of the drug discovery process. In a broader sense, it fits any kind of data for which a target preferred profile could be determined.

If you’re interested, you can download a free version, more information on how VlaaiVis works can be found in the online help pages.