The last milestone of NetBeans 6.7 is out. What has been improved and fixed in Groovy and Grails area? Read below.
The biggest change is that we changed our parsing and indexing infrastructure. This should unify the code across different languages and solve several Groovy and Java integration issues. As you can imagine this is quite a big change that does not affect Groovy only. So if you are going to use M3 or daily builds please let us know any bug or incorrect behavior.
The first visible enhancement (as opposed to previous which should be ideally invisible) is the Grails 1.1 support. Now you can install and uninstall plugins while seeing the proper code completion, relevant parsing errors etc.
This should work even in case you override some of the default settings in BuildConfig.groovy. For this purpose there is Resolve Plugins action in context menu of the project. You need to execute this action only if you are using non default values and you've opened the project for the first time or you've changed the values recently. The reason why this is not done automatically, although it would be possible, is that BuildConfig.groovy is in fact a script that has to be evaluated. The IDE can't be sure what are the side effects of such script so we decide to choose the conservative way of conscious action.
Perhaps we could add a download of missing plugins as a part of this action. It would be useful after VCS checkout. What do you think? Let me know.
Another related change is overall context menu cleanup as you can see on the following picture.
Now you can also assign shortcut (although there is none by default) to Run Grails Command action. This will certainly make you very effective. I think the usage of shortcut and command dialog is even faster than the console typing.
Another important improvements were made in wizards. You can now configure your Grails installation directory directly from the project wizard. This is especially useful for new users and when using the fresh IDE installation.
Artifact (domain, controller, service, etc.) wizard was improved as well. It was cleaned up and fixed so now you can finally easily create the artifact including the package easily.
In previous releases you might run into problems while stopping the Grails application on Windows from the IDE. This was fixed with great help from Lloyd Meinholz. So running and stopping the application from the IDE should be quite comfortable now.
Also many other minor fixes were made. For example dynamic finder code completion should be now properly displayed even when the domain class is not in the default package.
Unfortunately, as always, not all interesting changes made it to M3. Several performance improvements were made just after M3. Thanks to Göran Ehrsson for valuable reports. Also field code completion is now more accurate in daily build and Groovy file navigator was improved and fixed. As this is the last milestone and stabilization period starts the daily builds should more and more stable in future. In case you are interested in the latest features and fixes and/or you want to help us you can download daily builds from the NetBeans dowload page. If you even want a couple of minutes old builds with Groovy features integrated you can get a build from continuous build server.