Google is coming up with new and increasingly creative ways to lure developers away from rivaling cloud providers. As part of its efforts, the company has launched a plugin for JetBrain s.r.o’s popular IntelliJ IDEA that provides the ability to push code to its hosted platform-as-a-service environment directly through the native interface.

The offering appears to be a more refined incarnation of Google’s time-tested cloud extension for Eclipse, another popular integrated development environment. Whereas the latter tool is aimed purely at easing up application deployment, its IntelliJ counterpart comes with a couple of value-added capabilities designed to make programming smoother as well. The first is integration with the search giant’s code repository hosting service that lets developers save their work to the cloud similarly to how Office 365 apps can sync documents to OneDrive. It’s joined by support for Stackdriver Debugger, an application diagnostics service based on technology that Google obtained through a 2014 startup acquisition.

The tool enables developers to check a workload for issues while it’s running without impacting user experience or so much as having to use any special logging mechanisms. Google’s decision to make the functionality available for IntelliJ rather than another development tool likely has to do with the fact that it’s specifically geared towards Java, the go-to programming language in the corporate world. The company presumably hopes that making it easier for enterprise software engineers to use its public cloud will help sway the higher-up in charge of choosing what infrastructure-as-a-service platforms are used by their organizations.

The plugin has the added benefit of leveling the playing field against Amazon and Microsoft, whose public clouds can be integrated with IntelliJ IDEA as well. Google will presumably port the extension’s value-added capabilities to the Eclipse version sometime later down the line to strengthen its value proposition.

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