Using Groovy-Eclipse plugin to develop in Grails

Question

I am evaluating Groovy/Grails for a new project and I am wondering: Can the free Groovy-Eclipse plugin be used to develop Grails applications, and if so, what are the limitations? I am aware of the SpringSource Tool Suite, which includes full support for Grails in Eclipse, but it also includes a bunch of other stuff I don't care about, so I'm looking for a lighter-weight alternative.

Answer 1

STS does have more features/plugins/etc. than regular Eclipse, but they're lazily-loaded on demand, so you don't notice them at all - STS is just as fast as regular Eclipse.

There is a lot of work being done to support Grails in STS (v2.5.2 will be released soon) that won't be a part of the Groovy-Eclipse plugin since it focuses more on Groovy. Also I've seen questions on the groovy-eclipse-user mailing list about differences in behavior between the plugin and STS where features are only available in STS.

So I don't see any reason to use plain Eclipse + Groovy plugin over STS.

Answer 2

Unfortunately there is no full-featured support for Groovy/Grails in any of the IDE's.

For example, none o fthe IDE's support full code completion. But you can use it to build your projects.

I moved to intellij because it currently has the best support. Have a look at this to re-evaluate your decision. The list on the grails platform will give you a hint what is (at lest in one of the IDE's) not possible currently.

Answer 3

No, Groovy-Eclipse only supports Groovy development. For Grails support you'll need either STS or the commercial version of IntelliJ (the free version of IntelliJ only supports Groovy).

If you're worried about the extra plugins in STS, you can probably exclude them when installing it.

Answer 4

STS (SpringSource ToolSOute) offers a lot more support regarding Grails compared to naked Eclipse+GroovyPlugin. Also take a look at IntelliJ.