Bart's Blog: August 2007

Friday, August 17, 2007

More on IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 M2 EAP and JetGroovy

Just tried out the test runner and the debugger for a Grails application. Both work awesome without any setup or configuration. My integration tests ran within the typical IntelliJ IDEA test runner and the debugger worked too. I'm just stoked about Groovy and Grails development now!!

First impressions of JetGroovy in IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 M2

Holy crap!! JetBrains really knocked the ball out of the park on this one. The newly released IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 M2 EAP supports a new Groovy/Grails plugin, JetGroovy, also created by JetBrains. I've been working with Grails 0.56 in Eclipse using the Grails Eclipse plugin. The plugin is not great and has some serious performance issues. BTW, I'm running all of this on Mac OS X 10.4. I tried out the new IntelliJ EAP with JetGroovy tonight. It absolutely rocks!! It found my Grails and Groovy distributions without intervention (they were setup in the environment on the OSX). Creating new domain objects, controllers, views, etc. is all done through the New... menu item. What's really cool is the quick view of the domain object, its controller, view, controller test, and domain test classes. Links to each are at the top of the editor window, and selecting a link changes the editor window contents to that file. Very, very cool. This plugin will singlehandedly get people playing with Grails and Groovy. Looks like a winner. Can't wait to see where this goes over the rest of 2007. IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 is set to be released in early 2008.

Sunday, August 05, 2007

HTTP Scoop utility for HTTP sniffing

If you're on a Mac and doing web development, HTTP Scoop is a nice little tool for sniffing HTTP traffic. My friend Ted hooked me on to this tool. Very nice and super easy to use.

Got a MacBook from my consulting client...

and I'm loving it!! This is really the first time I've ever done anything substantial on the Mac OS X platform. Wow! What a difference it is over Windows. I'm really enjoying myself on this thing. We're doing Adobe Flex and Groovy/Grails programming at my client and the Mac platform is great for this type of development. I just came from a .NET 3.0 programming gig using WPF and WCF and the Windows environment was really flaky, even with its own development tools. For Flex programming, I'm using Eclipse 3.2.2 and the Flex Builder 2 plugin for Eclipse. Works without a hitch. I've been pleasantly surprised by the plugin when running Eclipse on Mac OS X. It's very quick and responsive and development is a breeze. I'm really enjoying the Flex programming (two weeks in so far). I pretty sure my next laptop is going to be a MacBook Pro with the high resolution (1920x1200) display. The MacBook that I'm using now is great, but we're hooking up external LCD monitors for primary display. The 13" display on the MacBook isn't enough for development.