Grails Eclipse plugin

Question

Hi,

I've seen various posts on SO criticising the Eclipse Grails plugin, and am wondering if anyone has found a way to work productively with Grails within Eclipse?

I had a look at the Grails plugin page, and the information there doesn't look very promising, particularly the conflicting advice regarding the 'Disable Groovy Compiler Generating Class Files' setting.

Cheers, Don

Answer 1

I used to be a die-hard Eclipse fan (wouldn't even imagine that I would work on any IDE other than Eclipse). But, I had to ultimately quit Eclipse in favor of either vi or IntelliJ IDEA after getting frustrated for couple of months.

But that was almost a year back. Haven't tried it again. I have high hopes from SpringSource to improve Eclipse tooling.

Answer 2

Current IDE status for Grails dev:

1. IntelliJ Idea still the best, but costly
2. NetBeans 6.5 is MUCH better than 6.1, but released before v1.1, unsure what the 1.1 changes may have done to this.
3. Eclipse is still far behind. However, SpringSource is a major player in Eclipse, and they now own GOne, the main developers of Groovy/Grails. This is supposed to have the effect of speeding Eclipse plug-in development, but no results so far.

Answer 3

I'd recommend using NetBeans 6.7 for Groovy/Grails development or TextMate (Mac only). NetBeans 6.7 works great and should be able to tide you over until the Eclipse plugin comes out. Who knows, you may even like NetBeans more.

Answer 4

I've been experimenting with the NetBeans 6.7 release candidate after reading over the Eclipse documentation. So far it is a pretty nice way to work with Grails. You do have to configure your own hotkeys and such so that running your tests can be done in 2 key strokes.

I am having trouble with some of the claimed enhancements. My code completion isn't working on my own methods, that's the single most annoying thing so far (at least, that isn't just a consequence of me being used to statically typed Java). I need t figure out how to execute just a single test etc.

As someone that used NetBeans 7 and 8 years ago, I like what I see a lot better now. I ran screaming to Eclipse back in 03, but Netbeans seems to have matured quite a lot.

Answer 5

The Grails Eclipse Tooling available in STS is now becoming mature. I'd recommend trying this if you are still looking for a good way to develop Grails apps in Eclipse.

http://www.grails.org/STS+Integration

Answer 6

I just attempted to install Grails and Groovy plugins for STS as described in the link above, but it failed to install (it just looped in the install process forever). After some tinkering I gave up. It could be just me, but I'm getting the impression that the plugins are not matured so much yet.

Answer 7

prefer NOT to use STS - a custom Eclipse IDE for Grails. Looking to see if there is still a Grails plugin for Eclipse that would work. Using multiple projects that do not load in STS

Answer 8

I installed STS as a plugin into my Helios Java EE install. Have mostly been using it for a sample Grails project as I learned Grails, but seems to work fairly well. Definitely Groovy support in Eclipse has improved dramatically in the last year.