News from Mar 23, 2008

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.