NetBeans 6.7 M2 released with advanced Grails code completion

Last wednesday the NetBeans team released NetBeans 6.7 M2. For Grails developers this is great as it now supports code completion for dynamic methods and dynamic finders. Just great! And even better: debugging support is next on their priority list!



Check Petr Hejl's Blog for more information.

Grails, NetBeans and Microsoft Team Foundation Server

At our internal development factory at Valid we use Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) as the central versioning system. As we recently started a new Grails project we had to use TFS for versioning. We also use NetBeans 6.5 as it's has some nice Grails support.

When we started I had a little bit of caution against using TFS... And we faced some really annoying problem immediatly. You have to check out each file manually before you can edit it as the files are read-only. So for example when regenerating the controller and views for a domain class you have to check them out first... For Microsoft developers this is no problem as they are using Microsoft Visual Studio and the IDE is checking out the automatically when the change the file within their IDE.

For Eclipse users Teamprise ($$$) is available, but for NetBeans there is no plugin yet to work against TFS.

After searching for a solution I bumped at SvnBridge. SvnBridge allows you to use TortoiseSVN and other Subversion clients with Team Foundation Server. It converts the calls made by your Subversion client to the API supported by TFS. As NetBeans supports Subversion I gave it try, and my first experience is really good (just tried it out 30 minutes ago). I can connect with TFS as it was a Subversion server, and it automatically checks out the files when I edit them in NetBeans. Just great!

Here some steps to setup the SvnBridge:

1. Download SvnBridge from http://www.codeplex.com/SvnBridge.


2. Unpack the downloaded file and start SvnBridge.exe.


3. A new icon will appear in your taskbar to indicate SvnBridge is running, you can right click it to change settings. I changed the Bridge Port to 8085 as my Grails application is running on the default 8080 port.
   
   
   
   


4. In NetBeans go to Versioning -> Subversion -> Checkout as you would normally check out a Subversion project. You have to enter the bridged TFS/SVN path like: http://localhost:8085/[tfs.server.name]/[projectname] (e.g. http://localhost:8085/tfs.mycompany.com/myproject). Enter your TFS crendentials and you can check out your Grails project from TFS.
   
   
   
   

That's just it! You can now use NetBeans to enjoy working with a TFS versioning system. Don't forget all creadits go to SvnBridge.

RestoreState Plugin Released

After some posts (1, 2, 3) about remembering/restoring the state of list pages I decided to finally put this functionality in a tiny plugin.

The plugin provides convenient methods to controller classes for remembering state. With the default Grails scaffolding each time you navigate away from a list page (e.g. going to the show page) the state of the list is lost when you return. This can be annoying when you paged to a certain page within the list. A typical use case for this plugin is restoring the pagination state (like offset and sorting) of list pages

Have a look at the plugin page for more information.

Grails on NetBeans

Today NetBeans 6.5 was released. The Groovy and Grails support is really nice. I'm using it for a couple of months now since M1 and I'm really satified. If you haven't tried it and working on Grails projects you really should give NetBeans a go!

Can't wait though on better Groovy and Grails support in Eclipse. Let's see what SpringSource will bring us.

G2One - the Groovy/Grails company - acquired by SpringSource

Just want to mention I'm really amazed by the latest Groovy/Grails news that SpringSource has acquired G2One - the company (including the developers) behind Groovy/Grails. Congratulations guys!

Perhaps this was the last little push which was needed to get a full enterprise wide adoption of Groovy and Grails.

Also for the community good news. I guess there will be more money and resources available to further improve and enhance both technologies.

Grails wins RAD Race 2008

Paul Bakker blogged recently about winning the QNH RAD Race 2008 using Grails! On his blog he explains clearly that while Grails improves productivity dramatically also the architecture would work for large projects.

Jamie Craane - who partnered with Paul - also blogged about his impressions.

Grails article in Java Magazine

My article about Grails was published in the latest edition of Java Magazine. Java Magazine is an independent magazine (in Dutch language) which has a circulation of 5200 paid subscriptions in the Benelux.

If you understand Dutch you can download the article here.