Can I develop for Greenfoot using Intellij Idea?

Question

I'm taking a Java course where I have to do some development for Greenfoot. I'm very accustomed to using vim for development in C / C++ and so have been using Intellij Idea with a vim plugin.

I despise the Greenfoot IDE.

Is it possible to use Intellij to develop for Greenfoot?

Answer 1

I was able to go into the Project Structure, dependencies tab, select add module library and do attach classes selecting the /lib/greenfoot/standalone directory. This allows me to compile the balloons scenario cleanly. However, to actually run the scenario's you still have to use the Greenfoot environment due to all the games it plays behind the scenes.

Answer 2

As you've found already you can add libraries and mess around to get some bits working, but it's not officially supported (so might change from release to release or break) and most likely never will be. It's more by accident than design that it works at all this way.

I've often wanted to use a professional IDE for doing Greenfoot work myself, but the simple answer is that Greenfoot is primarily focused for beginners, for a fun and interactive way of teaching Java to people who have never programmed previously. The developers could potentially focus their time in providing official support for coding in other IDE's, but the amount of work required means it's pretty much been decided it's not worth doing.

If you haven't noticed already, Greenfoot 2 is now out with a much improved editor that supports basic code completion and intelli-sense. It's still of course nowhere near the IntelliJ editor, nor will it ever be, but it certainly makes developing in it more tolerable if you're used to something more advanced.

Answer 3

I use IntelliJ and I do not think it would be supported, but I am not certain.

This site has a similar question

Answer 4

This link is about Greenfoot in Eclipse, but the steps also seem to work with IntelliJ.

Basically you add bluejcore.jar and greenfoot.jar (found in your installation directory of Greenfoot) as your project libraries and create a properties file (details in the link) for Greenfoot. Finally select GreenfootScenarioMain as main class, this allows you to launch Greenfoot programs from within IntelliJ.