Many of us use Android Studio and IntelliJ every day, and appreciate how its rich feature set makes our job easier. Most people know that both products are built on the IntelliJ Platform, the same that underpins the popular IDEs from JetBrains, which has seen lasting success for over 20 years. It’s a solid, expansive, and by far the best foundation on which we could stand on to deliver developer goodies.

However, some parts of the IntelliJ Platform show the signs of time; in particular its UI framework, Swing, is proving the most limiting, having been around for almost 30 years. Don’t get us wrong — it works, and the IDEs themselves prove you can ship complex UIs by using Swing on the IntelliJ Platform. But as we looked at how nice it is to develop UIs on desktop by using Compose for Desktop, we thought: why don’t we do the same?

Enter Project Sparkles, which aims at gradually introducing new high-quality, polished UI surfaces in Android Studio and IntelliJ, developed in Compose for Desktop, with all the bells and whistles you can expect from a top-tier interface. In this talk, we’ll cover how Project Sparkles is impacting the development of Android Studio and IntelliJ, addressing long-standing user feedback, and how Google and JetBrains are working together to build a framework to make your favorite IDE even better and easier to understand.

We’ll demonstrate a few examples of features already shipping that are powered by Project Sparkles, explain what our goals and ambitions are, and even show some sneak peeks of things you may see in a future IDE version. We will also cover a roadmap on when developers can expect to use Compose for Desktop as a supported UI framework for IntelliJ plugin development!

UI enthusiasts, assemble!