Grails Documentation needs update for IDE

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Randeep Walia

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Jan 10, 2016, 10:24:17 AM1/10/16
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Section 2.6 of the Getting Started Guide, "Getting Set Up in an IDE", is inaccurate in many places. Newcomers to the Grails framework that try to treat this as Gospel in selecting their IDE will be in for a very unwelcome and frustrating experience. They may also believe the fault lies with Grails itself, and not outdated support.

IntelliJ
The IntelliJ section states that "The community edition can be used for most things, although GSP syntax higlighting is only part of the ultimate edition". This is wrong, as trying to import any non-trivial project into the Community Edition will not work.

Eclipse
Here the GGTS is recommended. That might have worked for Grails 2 and below, but there's no way it's going to work with Grails 3. It doesn't even know of Grails 3 existence and will lead developers down a very frustrating road. There's a post here that details a possible approach with Mars:
but even this setup has been giving me some problems in my initial testing.

NetBeans
The documentation points to a link for setting up NetBeans. This document basically just says, "setup your Grails environment, install Netbeans, and you are good-to-go". Well that's not the case for me. I have a project with a src/ folder that contains some Java artefacts as well and, similar to Eclipse, Netbeans doesn't recognize these. There are other issues too.

Bottom Line: The only IDE that looks to work with Grails 3 is the paid edition of IntelliJ (which is too bad because it sets the price of entry to Grails development at $500 for the first year!). I think the documentation should reflect that as this is where users start development and you only get one chance to make a first impression.

Jeff Scott Brown

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Jan 11, 2016, 6:52:27 PM1/11/16
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> On Jan 10, 2016, at 9:24 AM, Randeep Walia <fatpu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The only IDE that looks to work with Grails 3 is the paid edition of IntelliJ (which is too bad because it sets the price of entry to Grails development at $500 for the first year!).

It is true that the docs need to be updated and we will work on that (pull requests are welcome), but it is not true that the only IDE that works with Grails 3 is the paid edition of IntelliJ. I used the community edition of IntelliJ with Grails 3 for most of 2015 before IDEA 15 was released, and it works quite well. There are some nice things that the Grails tooling in IDEA 15 brings but it is a mischaracterization to say that the free version will not work with Grails 3. It does work with Grails 3 and is actually quite a nice development experience.



JSB

Jeff Scott Brown
Principal Software Engineer
Grails Development Team
Object Computing Inc.
http://www.ociweb.com/

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Ronny Løvtangen

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Jan 12, 2016, 2:20:55 AM1/12/16
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> On 12 Jan 2016, at 00:52, Jeff Scott Brown <bro...@ociweb.com> wrote:
>
>
>> On Jan 10, 2016, at 9:24 AM, Randeep Walia <fatpu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The only IDE that looks to work with Grails 3 is the paid edition of IntelliJ (which is too bad because it sets the price of entry to Grails development at $500 for the first year!).
>
> It is true that the docs need to be updated and we will work on that (pull requests are welcome), but it is not true that the only IDE that works with Grails 3 is the paid edition of IntelliJ. I used the community edition of IntelliJ with Grails 3 for most of 2015 before IDEA 15 was released, and it works quite well. There are some nice things that the Grails tooling in IDEA 15 brings but it is a mischaracterization to say that the free version will not work with Grails 3. It does work with Grails 3 and is actually quite a nice development experience.
>

While you certainly can do fine with Community Edition, you won’t get much help as a newcomer when it comes to navigation and autocomplete. I recently tried to introduce Grails to a colleague that had only Community Edition and our conclusion was that we should continue after installing Ultimate Edition.
You miss out on:
- GSP taglib support
- Model autocompletion in GSPs
- Autocompletion on bean methods, unless you use types when injecting
- Autocompletion on Gorm objects (dynamic finders, save, validate etc)
- Navigation between controllers and views
- Easily create views from controllers
etc


Best Regards,
Ronny

Chris Malan

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Feb 9, 2016, 11:08:19 AM2/9/16
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For Netbeans, install the Groovy and Grails plugin from the Tools menu item -> plugins.  I've never had Java classes in src.  I notice it's src/main/ in Grails 3.  In Grails 2 it was src/groovy and src/java.
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