JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA 7 M2 Adds Groovy/Grails Support, Dependency Analysis

JetBrains has released the second milestone of IntelliJ IDEA 7 which contains a number of enhancements and new features. Among them is a new tool for analyzing project class dependencies using Dependency Structure Matrix technology. This lets developers spot potential problems at a top level and then drill down to individual details.

M2 also includes full Groovy and Grails support with:

• Context-sensitive, type inference-aware code completion for Methods, fields, classes and keywords
• Cross-resolution between Groovy and Java classes, methods and fields
• Smart code navigation assistance with structure view, class and usage search
• Syntax and error highlighting
• Groovy-aware refactorings and imports optimization
• Dedicated Grails SDK configuration
• Built-in Grails generators for controllers, views, domain classes, jobs, scripts, services and taglibs

Grails creator Graeme Rocher had the following comments about the Groovy/Grails support:

I can’t wait for when it (the JetGroovy plugin) will be unveiled to the public.  When you're young and have the time and energy to spend hours settings things up, dealing with driver problems (read plugins), installing things over and over and dealing with the incompatibilities between different drivers (read plugins) you're ok with a PC (read Eclipse). When you get past this phase and just want to get things done on a platform that doesn't get in the way, then you choose a platform that does this for you like the Mac (read IntelliJ IDEA). It works out the box and everything is nicely integrated, including the Groovy plugin

Other features from the press release:

• Integration between Spring and Hibernate
• Enhanced Spring AOP, Hibernate and JPA support
• More flexible project configuration
• New refactorings, Maven support, better performance
• More flexible Version Control operations with ClearCase UCM and Perforce offline mode, plus improved change list management

Screencasts of the new Groovy, Spring and Hibernate features are available on the Jetbrains website. JetBrains has also announced that all users purchasing IntelliJ IDEA 6 before the end of the year will receive a free upgrade to IntelliJ 7 when available.