... or better yet, help it out. Let's recap a bit on the state of Groovy support in the 3 major IDEs. In the beginning there was Eclipse, a plugin put together by a small group of Groovy enthusiasts, which willingly shared ideas and put together the code in their spare time, you know your usual open source project right? As Groovy continued to gain adepts other IDEs were targeted. The most well known story is about JetGroovy, who went from nothing to the best Groovy support (so far) in about a year, most of the the work done by 3 paid employees, counting with the backup of their company: JetBrains. NetBeans seems to have started at the same time or a bit earlier, also as an open initiative, later to be officially supported when 2 full time employees continued the work. Groovy in NetBeans has as an advantage all the work the JRuby team did to support JRuby.

In the meantime the Groovy Eclipse plugin team continued their work as they have done since the beginning, this means no company is backing their efforts, every member has a day job, a family and a life, they decided to spend their free time hacking the plugin. This is why I feel sad (sometimes anger) when someone writes about the current state of the plugin in a negative way sure it is not perfect, beautiful and integrated as JetGroovy, but that is because the dev team is not working 9-5/5 on it nor getting a single dime for their effort.

I'm an Eclipse user, I've been using the Groovy plugin since the first day I tried Groovy and so far it has worked for me. Yes, I do get frustrated some times because the language support is not on par as Java's, but I know it is a work in progress and specially what is happening behind the scenes. So instead of just complaining and throwing stones I watch the project's JIRA from time to time to see if there is something I could do to help. I mean sometimes what the dev team needs is just your feedback, be it the stacktrace of the error you encountered or a detailed description (if it includes a testcase the better). However if you are in the position of contributing documentation, testcase or production code (even if it is just a small thing) you would have made a great difference.

The team just recently welcomed new members, 3 students from Switzerland, their goal? allow Groovy refactorings. They had to tame the grammar, giving back a better grammar that registered properly line/column information in some nodes that were missing just that. They have produced a very basic and localized code beautifier, as a side effect of their work, a more robust and complete one may come in the following months.