I might be late in the game with this post, but I have to comment on some niceness I have experienced when working with Groovy, Grails and IntelliJ IDEA 7.0. I received a license for IntelliJ IDEA when I attended the Groovy/Grails Experience in February 2008. That ended up being a very cool event; learning from the creators and contributors and getting software to make life easier all in one weekend.
I downloaded the JetGroovy plugin using IntelliJ’s plugin manager and I was on my way. First, I created a new Grails project and ran it to see that everything was setup properly with the plugin. Everything worked as I had expected and I was up and running with my new Grails project. Instead of working with this new project from scratch, I imported my Grails POC code and started working to make some minor changes to see how IntelliJ and Grails work together. I opened up one of my domain objects and noticed that the controller, views and tests were now just a click away on the toolbar while I was looking at my domain object.
If you are already familiar with the Grails world, above is a selector with the application’s domain objects, a quick link to the controller, views and tests that correspond to the domain object selected. Very nice.
Code completion, highlighting and refactoring are other nice features supported in IntelliJ via the JetGroovy plugin that we usually take for granted in the Java IDE space. The JetGroovy plugin does a great job of exposing a new Groovy developer to an environment that most seasoned Java developers are already accustomed to. So, if you are a Java developer who is interested in learning Groovy/Grails and would like to exploit the comforts of IDE support, IntelliJ 7.0 and the JetGroovy plugin will get you started on the right path.
