❯ Guillaume Laforge

Groovy / Grails support in NetBeans and GlassFish

Sun engineer Matthias Schmidt has just published an article on the progress of the Groovy and Grails support in NetBeans. The Aquarium also features the ongoing work on support of Grails in Glassfish.

On NetBeans front, Matthias Schmidt and Martin Adamek started working on a plugin back in November. You’ll need to use a NetBeans nightly build, and download the Groovy/Grails plugin from the updace center. The plugin already provides:

  • Method-completion including JavaDoc display for Groovy and Java
  • Code Folding of Groovy source files
  • Starting, stopping of the Grails server
  • Importing existing Grails projects with a week arranged display of project structure
  • Groovy/Grails module settings integrated into NetBeans options dialog
  • Marking of source code errors
  • Easy navigation of Groovy source code by using a navigator view
  • Customizing of Grails environment and server port
  • Auto-deploy to the Glassfish application server
  • Starting common Grails tasks from context menu
  • Status of running Grails server displayed in status-line
  • Syntax highlighting

This is a promising beginning, but there’s definitely more to come:

  • Debugging support
  • MultiView for easy navigation between corresponding Model-View-Controller files
  • Refactoring support

On GlassFish’s side, Eduardo Pelegri reports improvements and bug fixes for running Grails applications in GlassFish and shares a link to the roadmap of the Groovy/Grails support in GlassFish.