Sun engineer Matthias Schmidt has just published an article on the progress of the Groovy and Grails support in NetBeans [1]. The Aquarium [2] also features the ongoing work on support of Grails in Glassfish [3].

On NetBeans front, Matthias Schmidt and Martin Adamek started working on a plugin back in November. You'll need to use a NetBeans nightly build [4], and download the Groovy/Grails plugin from the updace center. The plugin already provides:

• Method-completion including JavaDoc display for Groovy and Java
• Code Folding of Groovy source files
• Starting, stopping of the Grails server
• Importing existing Grails projects with a week arranged display of project structure
• Groovy/Grails module settings integrated into NetBeans options dialog
• Marking of source code errors
• Easy navigation of Groovy source code by using a navigator view
• Customizing of Grails environment and server port
• Auto-deploy to the Glassfish application server
• Starting common Grails tasks from context menu
• Status of running Grails server displayed in status-line
• Syntax highlighting

This is a promising beginning, but there's definitely more to come:

• Debugging support
• MultiView for easy navigation between corresponding Model-View-Controller files
• Refactoring support

 

On GlassFish's side, Eduardo Pelegri reports [5] improvements and bug fixes for running Grails applications in GlassFish [6] and shares a link to the roadmap of the Groovy/Grails support in GlassFish [7].