The IntelliJ Platform: a Framework for Building Plugins and Mining Software Data

TL;DR

This paper presents the IntelliJ Platform as a versatile framework for developing software engineering tools, highlighting its capabilities for data mining, machine learning, refactoring recommendations, and visualization within IDEs.

Contribution

It introduces the IntelliJ Platform's main features for research tool development and provides example plugins and templates for various use cases.

Findings

The platform supports diverse research applications like data mining and machine learning.

Existing plugins demonstrate practical implementations of these use cases.

Templates facilitate easier adoption and development of new plugins.

Abstract

In software engineering, a great number of new approaches are being actively researched, and a lot of tools are being developed based on them. These tools require a framework for their creation and an opportunity to be used by potential developers. Modern IDEs provide both. In this paper, we describe the main capabilities of the IntelliJ Platform that could be useful for researchers that are developing code analysis tools. To illustrate the benefits of using the platform, we describe several use cases that researchers might be interested in: mining software data, running machine learning models on code, recommending refactorings, and visualizing data in the IDE. We provide several examples of existing plugins that implement these cases. Finally, to make it easier to start working with the platform, we develop and provide simple plugins for each use case that could serve as a template for a new project.