The Kaptain on … stuff

The IDE world just started to look a little greener for Griffon programmers. Today’s latest early access version of JetBrains IntelliJ version Maia has initial support for Griffon!

It appeared on the JetBrains blogroll a couple of weeks ago, and indeed may have showed up in an earlier release, but today was the first time I saw it in action. I couldn’t find anything about this new feature mentioned explicitly in the release notes but sure enough, it’s there. Given the similar project structure between Grails and Griffon, and the first class Grails support already available in IntelliJ, it’s really not too hard to see how this platform is in an ideal position to expand Griffon support. Beyond that the general Groovy support seems to get better in every release. The EAP is free to try for any holder of an IntelliJ 8.x license and seems to be pretty stable despite the disclaimers – I highly recommend taking it for a spin, especially if you’re already using this IDE. You get properly configured source directories and dependency paths, access to Griffon’s command line scripts, and even that awesome new Griffon icon shown to mark out the project. What more could you ask for?

JetBrains was beaten to the punch by a NetBeans plugin for Griffon that was released in its initial version before this year’s Java One conference. I’m not a NetBeans user myself, but I am a frequent reader of Geertjan Wielenga’s blog – he’s published some great Groovy examples. Even the Eclipse community has finally gotten around to putting out some real Groovy support, largely due to SpringSource‘s commitment.

Hopefully their recent acquisition by VMWare won’t distract them from developing it too much 😉

Regardless of which development environment you feel most comfortable with, there’s no questioning this is a great time to be a Groovy/Grails/Griffon developer so enjoy!