groovy netbeans so far

been hacking away at groovy with netbeans as IDE for the past few weeks. Also using it with spring for a facebook application.

Well, I am still coding the java way... Hard to take the red pill. Groovy is nice, but not sure Ill use it for all coding in future applications. It can certainly be partly used, for often changed code. It may however replace my perl scripts.

As for netbeans and its groovy support. It does not seem finished: Its useable with neat tricks, but still fiddly, and some things just dont work. E.g creating a project from netbeans, then wouldnt let you add groovy classes to groovy folders only java source folders. Creating a project from scratch using maven archetype got working, but new java sources arent' happy then...

As in general use of netbeans it is very good, however a nightmare on a low memory machine, especially with encrypted disks. If I type one word, ill have to wait 10 secs before I can type the next word. Infuriating. So notepad++ is my general editor on that machine.

On a still low spec machine but without an encrypted disk it is better than eclipse. However all popups take 10secs before they finish "scanning", so they are irritating.

As for general development with groovy, it certainly increases developer velocity. However I keep flicking back to Java as certain mixture of architecture and technology is not quite there yet.

One thing that does work well with groovy and spring is spring's new annotation based configuration.

One thing I hope will soon work is dynamic beans, which spring has, but does not as yet work with annotations.

groovy maven netbeans jetty facebook spring

Time to rewrite my old wishlist facebook application.

The old one (v3.x) dont work anymore as the web services are gone, I took them offline many months ago. The new application will use the wishlist 4.x web services running on wish.flurdy.com.

Tech stack for this project will be:

Language: groovy.
Build tool: maven.
Web server: jetty (maven plugin).
IDE: netbeans (6.5, with groovy plugin and maven plugin).
Framework: spring (+mvc and WebServices).

So really, only groovy is new compared to the other wishlist projects, but it will be nice to see groovy interact with them.

Already hitting some snags with groovy, maven and netbeans. Seems to be a few posts on how to use netbeans and groovy, or maven and groovy, but not all 3 together.

May at some stage try grails.