Eclipse Wiki Weblog

Wednesday March 07, 2007

Eclipse Grails plugin (very early alpha)

I created a Grails plugin for the Eclipse Java IDE.

You can download it here (source code included):

http://www.groovy-news.org/e/org.codehaus.grails.eclipse.externaltools_1.0.0.jar

Install the *.jar file in your eclipse/plugins directory and restart Eclipse with the -clean option. Set the GRAILS_HOME classpath variable in your Java->Build Path->Classpath Variables preferences menu.

I simply wrapped the calls to the Grails Ant targets with some Eclipse external tool calls (see the org.eclipse.ui.externaltools plugin for more information).

Usage

Do a "right mouse click" on a Grails project node in the Eclipse Package Explorer and choose the menu Grails and the appropriate target you would like to run. The script should show its output in the Eclipse console.

Disclaimers bugs and problems

This is a very early plugin version intended for feedback and I've only tested it under Windows XP.
On my Windows XP box the Grails scripts start very slow. So for often used grails targets (like creating a domain class), it may be better to reimplement the functionality directly in the Eclipse plugin, instead of running the Grails script.
In the menu Run->External Tools->External Tools... there is a new launch configuration type Grails Tools. The Refresh Tab functionality doesn't work correct at the moment.