Technology
NetBeans 6.7 RC3 – it’s alive
Following Petr’s comment on the previous post, I filed a bug report for the NetBeans 6.7 RC3 installer on Windows XP today. By ignoring this:
NetBeans 6.7 RC3 installer warning
and by clicking “Ja” (Yes) I managed to make the installer do its job. However, this only worked after a system restart – somehow, there were obviously still stale processes floating around before the restart.
I’m now going to retest the Grails support. Hope it works. :)
In the meantime, I recommend reading this one and the other posts on Petr Hejl’s blog.
Grails IDE fail
I’m trying this and that with Grails at the moment, and I was willing to find out which IDE I should use on Windows. “The Definitive Guide to Grails” mentions Eclipse and Netbeans, giving Netbeans an advantage because the Eclipse Groovy plugin is still under heavy development. Okay. I don’t want to frustrate anyone or bore the reader with long stories, here’s the results after some hours of testing the proposed IDEs:
- Netbeans 6.5 works out of the box, but seems to be buggy, or maybe Grails 1.1.1 is buggy. I got lots of stupid errors stating problems like “xy is not a domain class”. My browser (Firefox 3) went crazy opening a new tab every couple of seconds when I ran the Grails application. On top, Netbeans did obviously not really kill the Java processes it created when I clicked “Run Application” – in the end, I had to manually remove 6 Java processes until I could do a “clean start” of my Grails app. No good. Netbeans seem to suck anyway, I had lots of problems with it in the past.
- Netbeans 6.7 RC3 won’t install on my computer, the installer does either nothing at all or it goes into Nirvana, leaving a stale Java process behind.
- Eclipse Ganymede lets me install the Groovy plugin (I tried the latest development build as well as the stable release), but that’s pretty much all that works. Check out this article if you want to know which manual steps have to be done in order to get it working at all – okay, I would have gone through this, but I was stopped quite early because of several internal plugin exceptions telling me that a couple of classes were missing and that this-and-that could not be executed. Gosh.
I’m tempted to say that RadRails (now Aptana etc.) for Ruby on Rails development was pretty much of a kick-ass application, also Eclipse-based, and I’m quite unhappy with the state of things when it comes to Grails IDE integration…
Looks like my choices are:
- Buy IntelliJ IDEA
- Buy a Mac and try Textmate
Both no option. So I think I’ll go on with a plain text editor.
If anyone has a working Grails IDE based on Eclipse or Netbeans, let me know!