favourite IDE for griffon development

Question

I am experimenting with Groovy Griffon development and I am wondering what IDE to use.

I am trying to use NetBeans 6.5, and I found this post

https://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/notes_on_converting_netbeans_grails

essentially it describes forking the NetBeans trunk and hacking the Grails support; I was hoping for something more lightweight.

Are there any simple tools to create eclipse, netbeans or pom.xml's from Griffin Apps?

Or is it best to use a simple text editor?

Answer 1

There is a NetBeans Griffon plugin already available at http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/PluginDetailPage.jsp?pluginid=18664

Answer 2

Griffon apps have some rudimentry hooks already for IDE integration.

First, a .classpath and .project file are generated that mark the expected source and test directories for Eclipse. Both IntelliJ and NetBeans have importers for these eclipse files (and they work, I use them regularly).

Second, Griffon 0.1.1 adds more targets to the parallel build.xml so that more of the common scripts can be used as though they were ant tasks (run-app, compile, debug-app, etc.)

Third, there is some better IDE support in the works form some of the IDE vendors. As mentioned in the article you linked because Griffon is grails derived it is fairly easy to re-purpose existing Grails support. IntelliJ has the only specific tracked feature request I am aware of.

Answer 3

IntelliJ Idea has very good Griffon support.

Answer 4

This question usually comes with a next question:

How to debug Griffon?

Just in case someone still requires a helping hand trying to figure out how to debug Griffon in Eclipse/STS I've written a simple step by step guide to get it done:

http://ivo43.blogspot.com/2012/02/debugging-griffon-in-eclipsests.html

Hope it helps someone someday, :D

PD: I've tried Netbeans and even though it looks great am still with STS, call me a maniac!