Saturday, October 27, 2007

Amazing JetGroovy plugin



First of all I need to say that I'm a happy daily Eclipse user; Eclipse does (almost) everything I want from a Java IDE.
In the past I also used JDeveloper using Oracle's proprietary Application Development Framework (ADF) and experimented a little bit with NetBeans.
But I actually never tried IntelliJ. Maybe because the price tag of $499 and because Eclipse is working good enough for FREE.

IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 was released recently and the fully functional Beta version of the JetGroovy plugin provides excellent Groovy and Grails support.
A lot of people were very enthusiastic about this JetGroovy plugin I gave it a try this evening and I was really amazed as it worked perfectly:

Code completion/assistance


  • Groovy code completion for keywords, classes, fields and methods

  • Cross-resolution between Groovy and Java classes, methods and fields

  • Syntax and error highlighting

  • Groovy-aware refactoring



Grails application and artifact creation

  • Grails applications can be created from using a wizard

  • Grails artifacts (like domain classes, controllers, views etc.) can be created using a wizard



GSP support

  • Groovy code completion

  • Tag completion (both Grails core and custom created tags; even tags with custom namespaces are resolved ;-) !)



When developing Groovy and/or Grails projects then IntelliJ is a real recommendation.
I hope one day we will see the same functionality provided by the Groovy Eclipse plugin.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Some great Groovy/Grails news this week



Some really good Groovy and Grails news this week I wanted to mention (or better copy from Graeme Rocher's Blog)

First LinkedIn, a online network of more than 14 million experienced professionals from around the world, are looking for software engineers preferably with Groovy/Grails experience.

Then big ERP software giant SAP announced that they have released a new community driven product called Composition on Rails that allows you to use their SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment to quickly prototype applications using Groovy/Grails.

And today G2One Inc - the Groovy/Grails company was announced. G2One has been founded by Graeme Rocher (Grails Project Lead), Guillaume LaForge (Groovy Project Lead) and Alex Tkachman (Former JetBrains COO) to provide consultancy, training, support and products around Groovy & Grails. Personally I think offering commercial support etc. will help adoption signifantly. And with this Groovy/Grails can be developed further. This is the same as e.g. JBoss and Spring are offering great open source software for free, but still making money to constantly evolve this free software.

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Grails i18n templates plugin released



After my previous post about i18n aware scaffolding templates I decided to create a plugin for those templates. For documentation and installation instructions see http://www.grails.org/I18n+Templates+Plugin