Earlier this week, Jetbrains launched version 6.0 of their IntelliJ IDEA Java development tool. One new feature I'm particularly excited about is the ability to chat and collaborate with other developers from inside the IDE.  See the IDETalk section of their collaboration feature description -- the feature allows you to see the presence of co-workers, send code-pointers, and view one another's source files. It's all built on XMPP using our Smack library.

I'm happy to announce that we've partnered with Jetbrains to launch a free hosted service that allows IntelliJ users to take advantage of the feature: intellijoin.org. Just choose the "register new Jabber account" option inside IntelliJ and select intellijoin.org as the server (the default). You'll get a new account on the Intellijoin Wildfire server which will allow you to collaborate with anyone on the federated XMPP network (including Gmail contacts). Alternatively, you can install Wildfire for your own organization, which will also work great with IntelliJ.

This IntelliJ IDEA release is a good example of "contextual collaboration" (adding collaboration directly into an application where it makes sense). The IDETalk feature is already pretty useful and I'm excited to see how it will evolve. I expect to see many other business applications adopt contextual real-time collaboration over the next couple of years. I can only hope that others will be as visionary as Jetbrains in using an open standard (XMPP) to make it happen. The advantages to doing so are pretty clear: faster time to market with great tools like Smack and Wildfire, a huge existing install base, and interoperability with other applications that use the open standard.