Installing Groovy - Making Java Groovy - page 393

tp://groovy.codehaus.org/Eclipse+Plugin . The plugin can also be found at the Eclipse Mar-
ketplace.
Eclipse has an annoying bug that requires the installation directory to be writable by the
user. Groovy Eclipse cannot be installed into a so-called “shared” install, which often in-
cludes the c:\Program Files directory on Windows. Simply move your Eclipse installation
somewhere else, and you'll be fine.
If you only want to use Groovy, the Groovy Eclipse plugin is sufficient. If you want to use
Grails as well, then you can install the Groovy and Grails Tool Suite, GGTS. GGTS is a set
of plugins based on Eclipse and is managed by Pivotal (formerly SpringSource). You can
download GGTS from www.springsource.org/downloads/sts-ggts . Be careful: the site lists
the STS downloads first and the GGTS downloads below that.
Both STS and GGTS come from the same code base. The difference is the initial set of plu-
gins. GGTS comes with both the Groovy Eclipse plugin and Grails support that provides
an entire Grails perspective, various wizards, keyboard shortcuts, and more.
The major IDE alternative is IntelliJ IDEA. The page at www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/
groovy_grails.html discusses its Groovy and Grails features. It even has Griffon support,
which is pretty unusual at this point. IntelliJ IDEA is the tool of choice of most of the core
Groovy, Grails, and Griffon team members, but it's a commercial product and therefore
requires a license. [ 5 ] If you participate in an open source project or make presentations at
your local Java/Groovy/Grails user group, you can get a free license, which is one more
reason to participate in the open source world.
5 There's a community edition that didn't used to offer Grails support, but that may be changing. Be sure to check
the website for current capabilities.
The web page at http://groovy.codehaus.org/IDE+Support lists plugins and support for oth-
er IDEs, ranging from Emacs to TextMate to UltraEdit. If you can't find the one you're
interested in, be sure to ask on the mailing lists. Somebody will know and tell you where to
find what you need.