JetBrains announced its first ever plugin competition for IntelliJ IDEA, the company's award-winning Java IDE (integrated development environment). The JetBrains development team will consider all IntelliJ IDEA-compatible plugins submitted during the contest, dubbed the IntelliJ IDEAL Plugin Contest. Top entries will win their developers a combined total of US$10,000 in cash prizes and more than US$15,000 in software licenses from JetBrains and other Java-oriented vendors.

"Our IntelliJ IDEAL Plugin contest provides an unprecedented opportunity for IntelliJ IDEA users and other Java developers to show their skill and creativity," said Sergey Dmitriev, JetBrains chief executive officer. "The entire IntelliJ IDEA community will benefit from the influx of new and useful extensions for their IDE of choice. This competition will inspire the best of the best to participate, share and - for top entries - win substantial prizes."

All contest entries, regardless of whether they win a prize, join the ranks of hundreds of popular IntelliJ IDEA extensions already available in the new IntelliJ IDEA Plugin Repository (http://plugins.intellij.net/).

Developers can submit plugins in any of 32 top-level categories in the IntelliJ IDEA plugin ecosystem, and they may create plugins that fall into new categories. Existing plugins cover a wide range of applications, from code editing enhancement and Java EE development facilitation all the way to just plain fun things. Entered plugins will be judged according to their usefulness, creativity and elegance, completeness, and code quality and documentation.

IntelliJ IDEAL Plugin Contest entrants may enter new plugins or may add functionality to existing plugins. New functionality must be developed specifically for this plugin competition and only the new functionality will be judged.

Eligible plugins must be compatible with the IntelliJ IDEA 5.1 Open API and/or 6.0 Open API (a beta version of which is available at http://www.jetbrains.com/doublebeta.html) and must be submitted under a Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) open source license (for information on this license, visit http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php) or under an Apache License (for information visit http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html).