Issue
Netbeans 8 works quite well with Grails. I can click New Project to create a new Grails project. Netbeans 8 can show the project with Domain, Controller, Views folders on the left nicely. I can even debug the project with breakpoint. Netbeans 8 only works well with Grails 2. But at lease it can show the project folder structures nicely with newer versions of Grails like 4 and 5.
Netbeans 14 is missing all of these with/without the default Groovy plugin. It can't even open a simple Helloworld Grails project I create using the grails create-app helloworld command.
I googled Netbeans and Grails but the posts were quite outdated from many years ago. They said to use the Netbeans 8 Groovy plugin.
Is there any updated way to setup Netbeans 14 to work with Grails?
I attached 2 pictures. One is how it looks with 14. The other is how it looks with 8.
Solution
Unfortunately, I think the answer to your question is that Netbeans 14 does not support Grails. It's tough to prove a negative, but there is very strong circumstantial evidence of that being the case:
- If you go to the homepage for Apache NetBeans there is a Plugins menu entry,and clicking that yields a list of the 62 available plugins. If you search that list list for "Grails" nothing is returned, so there is no "official" plugin for Grails.
- Within NetBeans 14, if you select Tools > Plugins and search the Installed and Available Plugins tabs for "Grails", nothing is returned.
- If you review the "What's Changed" entries for NetBeans 14 there is no mention of Grails.
- Note this comment from GeertJan Wielenga, Release Manager for Apache NetBeans in 2019 (emphasis mine): "I would recommend to keep the name at Groovy, because otherwise when we re-add support for Grails, we’ll need to call it ‘Groovy, Gradle, and Grails’. And anyway both Gradle and Grails derive from Groovy, so keeping the name Groovy makes sense."
Notes:
- For some releases since NetBeans 8.2 it has been possible to add Grails support using the old 8.2 plugin (e.g. this answer), but the approaches were brittle, and did not offer any functionality beyond that available in NetBeans 8.2. I suppose you could try a similar workaround to get Grails running on NetBeans 14, as described in SO answers for other NetBeans releases, but stability might be an issue.
- For what it's worth, Intellij IDEA provides a Grails plugin, though I haven't tried it.
- Finally, Grails not working in NetBeans 14 should not be viewed as a NetBeans issue. Instead, it's a third-party plugin issue, and as far as I know there has been no development on the 8.2 plugin you are currently using for years. (That said, it would be helpful if the NetBeans documentation for each release formally stated any new functionality, and any functionality that was no longer supported, or no longer worked.)
Answered By - skomisa
Answer Checked By - David Marino (JavaFixing Volunteer)
