IDEA 11 and grails 1.3.7 / 2.0

Last week I gave IntelliJIDEA a shot at grails since we now have both, a new version of grails (2.0) and IDEA (11) which has a reputation for good grails support in the ultimate edition. Creating a new grails project with grails 2.0 was no problem at all. Although you have to inconveniently download and extract grails yourself, everything else works like a charm. IDEA has very good in-build support for grails, meaning you can install plugins via IDE etc. It provides a dedicated grails view for your projects and thus is offering kind of the same support as Springsource's own IDE called STS. A feature for building different kinds of grails classes is also given. What I particularly like is that you can create controller, views and tests directly via buttons offered on top of the domain class editor view. Just great :-)

But so far we haven't seen anything worth what Jetbrains charge for their software. This only becomes apparent if you use it for a little while. In the process you'll learn that code completion is by far superior to STS. IDEA always knows exactly what your domain classes look like and offers the right completion for dynamic finders à la findAllBy*. Cool stuff, but most convincing to me is actually the very good reaction time of IDEA compared to STS with mostly sluggish behaviour and an auto-update function that never worked for me. Bottom line for me was that I know decided to switch to IDEA.

For people moving from STS to IDEA, another thing will be most important. How difficult is it to move existing grails projects to IDEA? I mainly work on one project upgraded to grails 1.3.7 that involves a number of inplace-plugins. I told IDEA to create a new project from existing sources, selected the encompassing folder of all my projects and clicked next. IDEA recognized all my projects as grails/groovy projects, so I just had to select grails. Next, it asked for the SDK to use. Instead of using the 2.0 grails I added a new SDK pointing to the grails 1.3.7 folder of STS. After that, IDEA recognized all my plugins correctly (my former projects are now modules) and my application works out of the box with a normal startup (mainly thanks to using the same grails installation that already has downloaded all the necessary plugins). I was astonished how well that actually went :-)