Colin Harrington

Groovy and Grails IDE Shootout

by Colin on Feb.11, 2009, under Groovy-Grails

Last night at the Groovy Users of Minnesota (GUM) meeting we did an IDE shootout where we covered Groovy and Grails support in the more popular IDEs.

Jesse O’neill-Oine from Refactr started us off with TextMate. 

I (Colin Harrington) presented on Eclipse and Netbeans:

Hamlet D’arcy teamed up with Matt Abrams & Bob Schultz to close out the night with Jetbrains‘ IntelliJ-IDEA.

Ironically IntelliJ-IDEA 8.1 was released the very next day.  Hamlet has some good tips on his blog about Intellij-IDEA.

This is an ever improving topic and changes very rapidly, so If we missed anything just drop us a comment :-)

Special thanks to Guillaume Laforge, Petr Hejl, Sven Haiges of the Grails Podcast as well as everyone who has contributed to the community via blogposts, documentation updates, etc.

Enjoy.

 

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10 Comments for this entry

  • Ted Naleid
    February 11th, 2009 on 7:58 pm

    Thanks for posting this Colin. Was there any consensus after the meeting? Anyone convince anyone else to switch? Any top tricks that you didn’t know beforehand?

  • Colin
    February 11th, 2009 on 11:05 pm

    I think IntelliJ IDEA really stole the show, and good for them. I learned that Jetbrains were the ones that originally wrote the Joint compiler(3-pass) and deserve to be king for the moment :-)

    People really liked the ‘green bar’ testing support in IDEA. Using textmate is a matter of preference. Eclipse support is sorely lacking. The quote that I got off of the User List was “friends don’t let friends use eclipse for Grails development” (Daniel Honig) Netbeans definitely won in the free space. Netbeans has come a long way. What it has support for is pretty solid, but hopefully we will see some more from it (Debugging!!! / Watches)

    Hamlet has some good Groovy Intentions that I didn’t know about before, and since I was new to IntelliJ last April, I have picked up a number of the shortcuts but am still learning more tricks :-)
    Go IntelliJ IDEA!!!

  • Bill Turner
    February 12th, 2009 on 12:01 pm

    I definitely felt that Idea was the best of the bunch, though was not convinced that I should pay the price necessary to play. Thankfully, I won a free copy :-) So, my opinion may change over time. I can see that the intentions will be really useful for someone moving from java to Groovy. My concern, after cost, is the resource requirements. Needing 1gb to run (recommended), then opening a couple MS Office 2007 applications, Outlook and Word for example, and running on Vista may cause one’s machine to choke without a memory upgrade. (Okay, stop laughing, a lot of people do run in this environment).

    I agree that Netbeans is the tool of choice in the free space. I’ve been a loyal user of Eclipse since 2001 (ironically, moving from Idea’s Intellij platform). The plug-in just isn’t there. It seems there is a lot more support and planned development for Netbeans. I moved to it about four weeks ago.

    Personally, I didn’t find Textmate compelling, either. If I am going to do some quick editing or just want to look at something quickly, I’ll either edit it with TextPad, or view it with less (I run cygwin and do a lot of command line stuff there).

  • Brian Michelich
    February 13th, 2009 on 12:01 am

    Regarding TextMate as OS X only. There is an editor that is trying to mimic the functionality of TextMate for windows called E Text Editor, which can install the TM bundles. No experience with it, but maybe something to look at. http://www.e-texteditor.com/

  • Pablo
    February 13th, 2009 on 6:34 am

    I have been developing Grails applications in the last months using NetBeans.
    I was recently introduced to IntelliJ IDEA and in my opinion is a much better IDE for Grails development.

  • Colin
    February 25th, 2009 on 8:57 am

    Quick note about Netbeans:
    Netbeans 7.0 is re-branded as 6.7, and the M2 was recently released with some updated Grails support:

    Checkout the features (with screenshots)
    http://blogs.sun.com/phejl/entry/groovy_and_grails_in_netbeans

    and download the bits
    http://bits.netbeans.org/download/6.7/m2/

  • Colin
    February 25th, 2009 on 10:16 pm

    During the presentation the ‘green bar’ came up quite a few times: Here are some green bars in Eclipse!
    http://quest4grail.blogspot.com/2009/02/missing-green-bar-developing-grails.html

  • John
    February 27th, 2009 on 12:39 pm

    Most timely review. Thanks!

  • Jeremy Flowers
    August 17th, 2009 on 2:39 pm

    Really like the embedded Google doc slides.
    Is there a link or a book recommendation you have that shows you you do this in WordPress?
    Also if you have used Slideshare, can Google Doc slides be directly there too? Or is it more convoluted?
    Cheers

  • Colin
    August 17th, 2009 on 3:25 pm

    Jeremy,

    The Google presentations will give you the code to embed. You just have to select the right size and embed to your heart’s content :-)

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