NetBeans IDE 6.7

[Ben Aveling]

Hi,

NetBeans 6.7 is supposed to have 'improved support for Groovy'.

Has anyone used it yet, and care to comment?

Regards, Ben

[gianny...@ensta.org]

Hi Ben,

Never used it; I am an Eclipse aficionado.

FWIW, Graeme's web presentation last week was awesome! He implemented
a Twitter like application in about 45-50 minutes and he used
TextMate. Beside the fact that he has quite fast fingers (not the s in
fast...), TextMate made him even faster.

Personally, I am using Eclipse; the plugin is getting better. The
main features I am using are syntax validation + highlighting, Groovy
file compilation, GUnit test and debugging. Code completion and
refactoring is provided but not yet up to par.

If you decide to give a shot to NetBeans' support, then could you
please post your thoughts?

Thanks,
Gianny

[Michael Kimsal]

I'm using Netbeans 6.7 on a project.  I'd gone back to 6.5 for a bit because the git plugin worked for 6.5 but not 6.7.  However, the git plugin menu integration is clunky (imo) anyway, so I went back to 6.7.

There's better code completion.  Something that wasn't working in 6.5 worked in 6.7 (code completion-wise) but I can't recall specifically what it was.  I just know I beat my head on that problem for about 10 minutes, then decided to try 6.7 again and it just worked.

The whole IDE feels a bit faster to me, though having to wait for Grails to start constantly is still painful.  I tend to make changes to my domain classes a lot, so that's a problem I'll have to live with for the time being.

Also, creating of artifacts is a bit improved.  The context menus know more about Grails in general.  I've always been surprised at how bad Grails context menu integration was/is in IntelliJ - it's much nicer (imo) in Netbeans.  Perhaps Jetbrains just wants you to use keys for everything?

--
Michael Kimsal
http://jsmag.com - for javascript developers
http://groovymag.com - for groovy developers
919.827.4724

[Nick]

I use IntelliJ and find that Groovy support is quite good. Code
completion and basic refactoring seems to work.

[Michael Kimsal]

Maybe it's just the timing, but I hope you didn't get the impression I was saying IntelliJ Groovy support wasn't good.  It is.  I just don't like the Grails context menu support.

Or, perhaps you weren't addressing my comment at all  :0

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 8:22 AM, Nick <nlca...@gmail.com> wrote:

I use IntelliJ and find that Groovy support is quite good.  Code
completion and basic refactoring seems to work.

[Nick]

lol, I was just chiming in with my 2 cents worth. I didn't even read
your post when I submitted mine. But I do agree that IntelliJ's
Grails support could be better.

[gianny...@ensta.org]

Hi,

This may look a little bit old school but I typically use a shell
terminal to run Grails scripts, if necessary.

If you are working on a unix platform (hope you are :)), then you can
use this bash auto-completion script for the grails and grails-debug
command:

--- Start of bash script -----
#!/bin/bash

grails help | grep 'grails ' | awk '{ print $2 }' > ~/.grails/
grails.completion

_grails() {
COMPREPLY=()

local cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
local options=`cat ~/.grails/grails.completion`

COMPREPLY=($(compgen -W "${options}" ${cur}))
}

complete -F _grails grails
complete -F _grails grails-debug
--- End of bash script -----

Enter grails or grails-debug and tab away :)


Regarding the painful restart of Grails each time that a domain class
is updated, this is weird. Are you saying that the full grails Web-app
is restarted? I mean the JVM is terminated and run-app is re-executed
by NB?

Personally, I

grails-debug run-app

and attach the Eclipse debugger and changes (controllers, domains or
services) are relatively fast - at least this is not painful.

Thanks,
Gianny

[Michael Kimsal]

In dev mode

grails run-app

grails will automatically compile and reload pretty much everything automatically (controllers, views, etc.) 

Changes to domains cause the entire grails stack to have to restart.  Apparently this is due to some of the Hibernate stuff under the hood, although this might be able to be addressed in the future (per conversation with Graeme Rocher).

No, the JVM isn't necessarily restarted (I don't think so) but grails runs almost like it is being run from scratch.  This has nothing to do with netbeans - it's just grails.