JetBrains continues to expand its tranche of developer productivity tools this week with the launch of the WebStorm 4.0 JavaScript IDE. This latest version features support for the ECMAScript Harmony scripting language as well as new JavaScript Library scope configuration.
NOTE: In a company developer blog separate from the firm's product announcement, JetBrains explains that the main benefit of specifying JavaScript libraries in a project is to populate a completion list with relevant members only. "We have reorganized the configuration panel at Settings|JavaScript|Libraries, so it hopefully become easier to use. If you simply want to select a library for the whole project, check the corresponding box. For more complex library scopes configuration, click the Manage Scopes… button."
WebStorm 4.0 comes in a shiny new box with an HTML5 boilerplate and other web application templates. There are also smarter ordering of JavaScript completion options and custom code folding regions.
"We always try to adopt best practices that not only influence your productivity but also raise your code quality and we inspire other developers to do the same," said Alexey Gopachenko, WebStorm project lead. "In WebStorm 4.0, we introduced Code Coverage for JavaScript Unit Test, which lets you see how much code is untested — right as you code. The big idea is to prevent bugs instead of catching them."
