Blogging Roller

After going missing in NB 5.5, Groovy support is back in Netbeans. Basic Groovy support with syntax coloring and support for running scripts from the IDE is available in plugin form (download page) for Netbeans 6.0 (starting with RC2), read about it on Geertjan's blog.

Here's what's coming after Netbeans 6.0, Groovy project support:

After Netbeans 6.0, the story gets better. Geertjan writes that a brand new Groovy plugin will be available in the post-6.0 builds that adds support for three types of Groovy projects: applications, class libraries and Grails webapps.

Project Zero introduces a simple environment for creating, assembling and executing applications based on popular Web technologies. The Project Zero environment includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mash-ups and rich Web interfaces.

"This community is an experiment in a new way to build commercial software, an approach we are currently calling Community-Driven Commercial Development. Community-Driven means that we want feedback, insight, suggestions, criticism, and dialogue with you, the users of Project Zero. This interaction will yield a better solution that is more targeted at the problems you have and a technology that truly delivers on its objectives. Commercial means that this is not an open source project."

Speaking of open source projects that need help, there's Coyote, which promised to bring scripting support to Netbeans and did so for Netbeans 5.0. Since then, the project has been pretty stagnant. JRuby's getting all the attention these days.

Geertjan is doing his best to jump-start Groovy support in Netbeans, but it's not really his job. He's gone beyond the call of duty and it looks like he's got something pretty functional going, which is very nice. I've been doing some Groovy scripting lately, so I'll try it out. It would be cool if the Groovy project itself had time to help out, or even take over, but they're probably pretty busy too.