I understand that SpringSource Tool Suite is based on Eclipse.
I am coding Grails. STS is often pissing me off. I was thinking of installing Eclipse instead with a Grails plugin - will it just be the same?
What's better? STS or Eclipse?
Have you considered IntelliJ, it has excellent Grails and Groovy support. I had been a eclipse guy for years but I am loving IntelliJ now.
IntelliJ Grails Features
I believe STS incorporated the original Groovy plugin so you're honestly better off with STS than you are trying to hack together Eclipse with the old plugin.
That said, other IDEs with good Groovy/Grails support are:
IntelliJ IDEA: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/groovy_grails.html
NetBeans: http://netbeans.org/features/groovy/ (but development on Grails support appears to have stopped since 6.8.0)
I've personally tried IntelliJ and I liked it for Grails. I have not tried NetBeans but I've heard it is good.
STS has better Groovy n Grails support. The latest version i.e. 2.5.0 has better features and bug fixes. I would suggest you stick to STS rather than Eclipse. I have been using it for last couple of months and it is very stable. The latest version has much better features and is more stable than previous versions.
I found Eclipse with the Grails plugin easier to configure than STS, so I started out down that route. STS seems overly clunky and too specialized - if your app is anything over than a very vanilla grails app I'd say Eclipse is better.
Having said all of that, I tried IntelliJ IDEA and fell in love with it. I even forked out the $200 for a personal licence when my company said no to buying a license!
STS is an Eclipse distribution packaged by SpringSource, who also own Grails project. You should bring your specific issue to the vendor or at least describe them in your question.
I think you should definitely opt for STS - the integration of the Groovy resp. the Grails plugin is much better than in Eclipse.
On the other hand, the question is hard to answer without getting religious subjective; what are the issues you encoutered in STS and what makes you think they won't occur or even be more annoying in the main Eclipse distribution with no native Groovy/Grails support?
I have been unsuccessful trying to use the Grails plugin on Eclipse. After a lot of work finding the right repositories for missing dependencies, the Grails plugin practically took over Eclipse, it became a quasi STS Eclipse. Even the home window became the STS window!
I guess the producers of STS are basically trying to convince you to switch to STS, instead of using their almost worthless plugin, and going through the pain of getting the plugin working, and getting at the end a STS clone.
You are better off just using STS, but it angers me that people who like Eclipse or MyEclipse have to be forced to use STS' specific version of Eclipse.
Related
I am wondering is there no Groovy Support more in STS. I just wanted to give Groovy and Gradle a try with a new mini project and I remember in the past time there were a GGTS (Groovy&Grails Tool Suite).
Somehow I am not finding any Groovy IDE what works in STS 3.9.0 (Neon). Am I missing something?
Pivotal has dropped support for groovy in 2015 and with that the development of GGTS and the groovy plugin.
Fortunately the groovy-eclipse plugin is in development again, but there was no release for quite a while. The snapshot builds are stable enough in my opinion.
It's not a direct answer to your question, but if you want an IDE that supports Groovy and Gradle really well, then IntelliJ IDEA is now my go-to choice. And, yes, the free community edition provides full Groovy support.
Any input on how to get Maven war-app fully setup in Eclipse as "Dynamic Web Project"?
We have a webproject setup and working in Maven3.
Using Eclipse-Indigo, latest version, and running
mvn eclipse:eclipse
to import it into Eclipse.
This works fine for the Java-files compilation,
but cannot build a war-file and deploy to an appserver defined in Eclipse.
Would be nice to get that working, too.
(I read that you can use m2eclipse for this, but I sincerely hate it, because (at least some months ago when I last tried it) it's still ridiculously slow to build a reasonably large/complex application -- like it said "Build Project and go have a coffee" in the menu).
I now saw, however, that you can also do
mvn eclipse:eclipse -Dwtpversion=[version]
Problem, according to documentation
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-eclipse-plugin/eclipse-mojo.html
is that [version] can only be "R7", "1.0", or "1.5".
That seems like awfully old versions...
According to WTP documentation
http://wiki.eclipse.org/WTP_FAQ#What_version_of_Eclipse_does_WTP_work_with.3F
that would require you to downgrade to Eclipse-3.2 from way-back-when...
So anybody has a reasonable solution to this?
Can it also somehow work with recent versions of Eclipse and WTP?
Do not use maven-eclipse-plugin.
Instead use Eclipse's own m2e plugin.
If you follow the link, there is a video that will help you get started.
m2e is officially integrated with WTP and, from my experience, works very well.
We are experimenting with Grails development on Eclipse STS, and one of the most annoying problems is that, unlike Java code, there does not appear to be any code insight features for Grails and Groovy classes and methods. Only after compiling and running a Grails web app do we find out that a method or field name does not exist.
Seriously, there has to be something out there for minimal code insight (hoping).
I am sure that STS can in fact do this for you, it is basically what its Grails support is all about. Are you sure you have installed the right plugins? Documentation on this subject is right here: [1]: http://www.grails.org/STS+Integration
Side note: while STS does a decent job, I have been a happy user of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate edition and have never looked back to eclipse once i switched :)
what is the best goovy plugin for eclipse (helios)? I have download Groovy-Eclipse but the plug-in seems not good? cant go to methods by clicking ctrl and also cant debug too
The best Eclipse Groovy/Grails support is provided by the STS Eclipse distribution. If you're not using Grails and are only interested in Groovy I don't think you'll find this much better than the Groovy-Eclipse plugin, because I expect STS itself uses the Groovy-Eclipse plugin.
The best Groovy/Grails support is provided by IntelliJ. Eclipse has always been a long way behind.
Unfortunately, groovy-eclipse is the best there is.
If you want to improve your experience, I can only recommend switching to IntelliJ IDEA.
Groovy-Eclipse is your only option for editing groovy code in Eclipse.
Since the behavior you describe that is missing is a fundamental part of Groovy-Eclipse (ie- navigation to method declarations), it sounds like something is not set-up properly in your project. Perhaps your groovy sources are not on the Eclipse build path of your project. Make sure this is the case and let me know if this fixes your problem.
Since SpringSource / VMWare embraced the Grails and Groovy community, SpringSource Toolsuite (STS) has really increased the quality and integration of Groovy into the Eclipse environment. If you haven't looked at it recently, STS 2.7.0 was just released, and it includes support for Gradle, Groovy 1.8, and initial support for Grails 1.4 / 2.0. Groovy-Eclipse is the bundled Groovy solution, and enables the Groovy compiler, Groovy project types, as well as a number of other areas.
It's also important to note that the development is going at a pretty good place - some of the standard editing features are fixed month to month as dot releases are released often.
Intellij is also continuing to provide a great solution - but now that the Eclipse support is improving, there are two viable choices for developers to look at.
STS is available for Eclipse 3.6 and 3.7.
Has anyone been successful in getting the grails plugin for eclipse to work? How about grails plugin with netbeans?
If you use the NetBeans 6.5 Beta you'll see the Grails functionality is promising, but still buggy(minor). The good thing is in 6.5 Groovy and Grails support is standard, you don't have to install the plugins.
Unfortunately, there hasn't been much progress on the Eclipse plugin for Grails, we have started using IntelliJ IDEA for Grails development, the JetGroovy plugin is excellent and keeps getting better!
Netbeans 6.5 is pretty good for Grails and allows for debugging, though the code completion is just barely there.
Well, here's a quick update. The Eclipse plugin works, and has refactoring support. But, for some reason I can't get it to recognize the Grails plugins in the Eclipse project.
It's starting to come along though.
I haven't had any problems getting the Eclipse grails plugin "to work" insofar as it's installed and providing all the features advertised. The problem is that this set of features is minimal, and light years behind IntelliJ. I understand that switching from a free IDE to a commercial IDE isn't at all possible, but if it is, do it! Although Netbeans is better than Eclipse, it's still quite a distance behind IntelliJ.
Just for future documentation:
Netbeans 6.8 is available with a very nice Grails/Groovy Plugin that works like a charme.
Additionally you can use a new Code Coverage Plugin.
Really nice build.
Link:
Netbeans Homepage
But you have to keep in mind that Grails now belongs to Spring Source. Spring Source is known for developing their own Tool Suite based on Eclipse. Maybe we will see a better grails plugin implementation for Eclipse.