Improve IDE support, which should be seen as part of Grails project itself

[itexto]

This is a MAJOR problem on the Groovy ecossystem and should be thought as part of the Grails project if we want to gain traction.

Grails was initially projected to allow developers to work using only the CLI and a simple code editor: the problem is that we live on a JVM world, where we must deal with all the APIs provided by the libraries and plugins that compose our projects.

Until Grails 2.x we could rely on the support of some free IDEs like the old GGTS and Netbeans, but this is not the reality. There were some talks saying that "all major IDEs have some Grails support because of Gradle" (when on Grails 3 the old Gant was retired), but today that's not the case (actually Gradle support has been always many steps behind what we can find for Maven). We can see some support on the PAID version of Intellij and basically this is all we get today.

If we try to use something like VS Code (which is maybe more mainstream today than Eclipse) we see that we have almost no support both for Groovy and even less for Grails (we only have some code highlight).

Here is the situation of the code-groovy plugin for VS Code:

the last release is dated way back to 2018! And this is the most popular one.

[gsartori]

I agree on this.

At least for marketing/communication purposes we should update all the Groovy & Grails IDE plugin's "last update" metadata with the current year. Even if it means to just add a blank line to a random class and re-deliver.

The first thing junior developers watch is the "last updated" date.

That alone is a go/no-go decision.

[jamesfredley]

There was solid open source support for Grails in Eclipse and NetBeans, until several years ago. It would be nice to see that picked back up for Eclipse and VS Code, which have decent market share.

For now, IntelliJ IDEA has been the #1 Java IDE for many years, passing Eclipse and NetBeans, which was no small feat, and has maintained that lead.

The IntelliJ Grails plugin is constantly updated. https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/18504-grails/versions

IntelliJ has historically provided the highest level of support for Groovy and Grails and it continues to do so today. The Grails plugin is only available with the paid ultimate version and in my experience it is worth the small cost for the large developer productivity increases, across several teams I have worked on. There are many ways to get a lower price through JetBrains and the price goes down with each annual renewal.

In 2024, IntelliJ is the way to go for Grails development and is what most engineers are using. I used NetBeans and Eclipse for about 15 years combined before fully switching to IntelliJ, with years of overlap between the three.

[jamesfredley]

Surveys with Java IDE market share.

https://www.baeldung.com/java-ides-in-2024

https://snyk.io/blog/intellij-idea-dominates-the-ide-market-with-62-adoption-among-jvm-developers/

[codeconsole]

The IntelliJ Grails plugin is constantly updated. https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/18504-grails/versions

@jamesfredley Is it constantly updated? or is it just rebuilt with the latest version of the IDE? It's hard to believe any updates have happened in quite a long time considering it has been broken for a while now with the latest versions of Grails.

[jamesfredley]

I am not sure how many of those are rebuilds against a new IDE version.

I've used the plugin consistently for the last 3 years and have only bumped into 1 or 2 show stopper issues after new Grails releases that caused me to wait on an IDE or Grails release, usually for a few weeks. I am normally on the latest version of IntelliJ and ran EAP for a bit during one release. During those 3 years I have seen a number of plugin issues resolved and features added. Sometimes there has been a hunt to find a solution, like the grails-shell dependency with Grails 6+.

Some issues haven't impacted me as much as other teams.

[rainboyan]

I don't know if you have ever thought that since Grails is built on Spring Boot, then a Grails application must also be a Spring Boot application, but why can't we just use Spring Tools?

I think IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, STS 4 for Eclipse and Groovy Eclipse would be a good way to develop and debug Grails applications, of course, we prefer VS Code, and if I have more time in the future, I'll try to develop a Groovy & Grace extension for it.