A few weeks ago some co-workers of mine were having a discussion about IDEs and concluded that their Eclipse would be the right choice for all most every project. Sure IntelliJ had some nice features and so has JDeveloper, but Eclipse had plugins to do the same. Did Eclipse had the best of the IDE world ?

Then I stumbled upon some blog posts about Netbeans 6.5 and their scripting support for python, php, ruby(rails),groovy(grails). This reminded me about how much better Ruby, Ruby on Rails and JavaFX support was in Netbeans compared to Eclipse. Sure Eclipse has plugins for these platforms, but Netbeans support is better.

Now I started wondering, would Netbeans be better suited for all these scripting languages ? I gave it a try with the Grails framework, since I was interested in having a look at Grails anyway.
The following screenshot shows the app I ended up with. I know nothing fancy, just a few simple entities (movie, director) but still it’s a result (be it very small )

After working with the new Netbeans editor I must say I’m impressed with how easy it was to create this Grails app, without any experience with Grails or Groovy. I can see why people like groovy and Grails, although for a real comparison with RoR I should give it a bigger test-drive some day.

The conclusion of this story is that I’m impressed with groovy and grails now that I finally took the time for some minimal hands on experience. And Netbeans seems like the default editor for scripting; I now have postive experiences with JavaFX , Ruby and Groovy with Netbeans (so I guess it also will be just fine for Php and Python etc.)

note: netbeans 6.5 seems pretty stable for a beta, but the resources usage seems a bit high

Some links:
Blogpost:Netbeans with groovy & python
Blogpost: Netbeans with php, python, scala
Blogpost: Netbeans with javascript
Blogpost:Netbeans and Grails
Article: introduction to groovy + grails

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