Jetbrains Space: the all-in-one development tool of the future?

We developers have one thing in common: our work requires us to work with countless digital tools. Jetbrains probably thought the same thing. Their latest tool matches what you'd expect if you lumped together all the IDEs, Gitlab, Slack, Google Currents, Google Calendar, and also threw in a time management tool for good measure.

Space is an all-in-one solution for software teams. Projects can be linked directly to one or more, new or existing source code repositories. The platform advertises a seemingly endless list of features, especially in the organization section, that are supposed to support agile flexibility when working on digital projects.

We have taken a first look at some of these tools and given our review. This first article focuses on the code review workflow. Many tools, such as Fleet, could not be tested or only partially tested, as the product is still in the beta phase.

During testing, it quickly became clear that the main focus of Space is collaboration. There are many important features that support the joint development workflow. In this workflow, a new branch is created for every new issue. If a commit is shown a prefix that corresponds to an issue ID, it is displayed directly in the UI as a link that directs to the issue.

After the issue is fixed, a merge request is opened and a reviewer is added. Space also provides an area for this, where all requested code reviews can be easily seen and edited. Although that may sound a lot like the familiar Gitlab, Space takes collaborative features to a new level. Code can be commented on in a very practical way and shared directly in a chat room. This creates a nice workflow from ticket creation to release.

But Space also offers other tools like…

A calendar for collaborators, as well as a tool to set up meetings. There is also a blog section where employees can create small posts that others can respond to. With Space, users can also assign jobs and work through checklists.

All of these aforementioned features bring together what companies otherwise use across a dozen other platforms. That being said, we are still a bit skeptical about whether all these features really belong in a single developer platform.

The most revolutionary approach of Space is probably the remote development spaces, which boot up immediately with all dependencies at startup. So you can start programming right away. Everything is formed in the cloud and is therefore completely independent of the physical device being used. Gone are the days of version conflicts and hours of trial and error until the program can also run on your colleague's laptop.

Also, the eternal indexing, which is most know from IntelliJ, is rendered unnecessary. This saves an enormous amount of time when onboarding a new developer. Later with JetBrains Fleet (a lightweight development environment), it becomes possible to share such a remote space with other team members and work on team programming.

Multiple domains can also be created to test features with different dependencies. Want to share the latest development status with a customer? No problem, Space also allows product demo sharing via a URL.

JetBrains Space offers many exciting features that are very useful for developing software. The main selling point of Space is clear: all-in-one. Whether this approach is really user-proof, or whether Space will achieve “jack of all trades status”, remains to be seen. Especially with Fleet and remote development environments, the tool shows a lot of potential, potentials which we hope to present to you in full in the next article.