Grails Eclipse plugin

Question

I've seen various posts on SO criticising the Eclipse Grails plugin, and am wondering if anyone has found a way to work productively with Grails within Eclipse?

I had a look at the Grails plugin page, and the information there doesn't look very promising, particularly the conflicting advice regarding the 'Disable Groovy Compiler Generating Class Files' setting.

Answer 1

The Grails Eclipse Tooling available in STS is now becoming mature. I'd recommend trying this if you are still looking for a good way to develop Grails apps in Eclipse.

http://www.grails.org/STS+Integration

Answer 2

Original answer (left so people's votes aren't misrepresented):

Current IDE status (as of Mar '09) for Grails dev:

1. IntelliJ Idea still the best, but costly
2. NetBeans 6.5 is MUCH better than 6.1, but released before v1.1, unsure what the 1.1 changes may have done to this.
3. Eclipse is still far behind. However, SpringSource is a major player in Eclipse, and they now own GOne, the main developers of Groovy/Grails. This is supposed to have the effect of speeding Eclipse plug-in development, but no results so far.

It's now Dec '10, and things have changed (but not too much):

1. IntelliJ Idea is still the best, but only marginally so, and expensive.
2. Eclipse now has the STS (since Spring is a major developer), with a lot better Grails integration than before, especially for new projects. If you're using Mavenized Grails... you may still want to stick with IntelliJ.
3. NetBeans 6.9.1 is out, but its Grails support is stagnant since 6.5. It's now the bottom of the pack.

And now it's Feb '15, almost 6 years after the original question. Much has changed, but much remains the same:

1. IntelliJ is still the best, and by a growing margin. Grails 3 (due out next month) will actually allow development using the Community (Free) edition of IntelliJ
2. GGTS (The Eclipse package created by VMWare) has never really caught up, and will only get further behind now, as Pivotal has ceased its sponsorship of the Groovy/Grails team, and will probably also no longer drive GGTS development.
3. Seriously, does anyone still use NetBeans? Ok, I see they still support Grails, but I don't really have any idea how good that support is. Everyone I know... EVERYONE... uses IntelliJ.

Answer 3

I used to be a die-hard Eclipse fan (wouldn't even imagine that I would work on any IDE other than Eclipse). But, I had to ultimately quit Eclipse in favor of either vi or IntelliJ IDEA after getting frustrated for couple of months.

But that was almost a year back. Haven't tried it again. I have high hopes from SpringSource to improve Eclipse tooling.

Answer 4

prefer NOT to use STS - a custom Eclipse IDE for Grails. Looking to see if there is still a Grails plugin for Eclipse that would work. Using multiple projects that do not load in STS