Tom Cornilliac

Out of the box the JVM arguments for IntelliJ IDEA need a bit of tweaking if you plan on doing any serious development. Lately, in addition to Flex 4,  I’ve been cutting my teeth on Groovy and Grails and I’ve found IDEA’s 256mb default heap size to be barely adequate for the task. Bringing the heap maximum up to 512mb (-Xmx512m) makes a huge difference in how the IDE and framework perform.

When I went Googling for information on how to set the IDEA JVM on OS X I assumed I would find a wealth of information for said task. Turns out I was both right and wrong. There is a wealth of information but it’s all for Windows and since the IDEA config under Windows is different than OS X I was left wanting. In the end I was able to Google one lonely site with the correct information for OS X but the site was offline and I ended up having to use Google cache to get the information. Hopefully this post will help the next poor soul who goes looking for how to set the IDEA JVM heap maximum under OS X.

1. Locate the App. If you have a standard installation it will be under /Applications
   
   .
   .
2. Open the App package
   
   .
   .

3. Using your text editor of choice open the info.plist file under “contents”
   
   .
   .

4. Edit the “VMOptions” key. I have my heap maximum set at 512mb and my minimum at 64mb
   

That’s it. Restart IDEA if it’s running and you should see your heap changes in right corner of the application status bar.

By the way, if you’re doing any Groovy or Grails development, IntelliJ IDEA is a fantastic IDE with undoubtedly the best Grails support around.

We knew it was coming but we didn’t know when or in what form. Adam Flater just posted that the Artemis project has officially been reborn as the Merapi project. The list of contributors looks impressive, including both developers and designers.

For those of you not familiar with Artemis Merapi, it’s a framework for connecting Adobe AIR applications to the desktop using Java technology. Merapi picks-up where the AIR 1.0 runtime drops off, in that while AIR can read and write from the native file system it cannot launch native applications or interact with the shell.

Merapi has huge potential and I’m looking forward discovering what’s possible when we can combine the power of Java with the richness and ubiquity of Adobe AIR. These are exciting times indeed!

By the way…looks like the namesake might be a mountain in Java Indonesia

Edit:
Andrew Powell has also posted a few words about Merapi and a few more about why they chose the name. (02/05/08 09:37am PST)