Opinions expressed in this post are totally my own and not necessarily that of my employer.

Wednesday started with the infamous “scriptbowl”, a competition between various scripting languages. This year the contenters were JRuby, Groovy, Scala, and Clojure. I wondered whether Scala considers itself a scripting language but obviously they either do or just seek the opportunity to be on stage.

To keep a long story short: Groovy has won this event for the third time in a row! This year the race was tied with Scala. Guillaume presented Groovy in the typical Groovy-idomatic style and explained every single line of his concurrent visual analyzer for Google+ postings. Dick Wall presented only non-idomatic Scala code. I interpret this as: to make Scala appealing you have to make it look like Groovy. Furthermore, he presented Kojo, which is a great interactive learning environment written in Play/Scala. In contrast to all other presentations, this was not specifically created for the scriptbowl, nor was it written by the presenter, nor was it clear how much effort went into it, nor did the audience see a single line the implementation code. How much this skewed the comparison, I leave to everybody’s judgement. The show was good, though.

I felt a bit sorry for Clojure. It is a great language and deserves a presentation that is more visually appealing to convince the crowd.

Afterwards, I attended a hands-on lab for “rapid enterprise development with netbeans”, which was essentially creating a Swing app for database CRUD actions. If I remember correctly, I did the exact same task 1997 with JBuilder. It left me with the feeling of “Yes, it works” but it is not less complex than it was 13 years ago.

Early afternoon Gerrit Grunwald (better known as @hansolo_) presented his work on simplified custom components for Swing. Given that he speaks about an activity that is both utterly important and highly underadvertised he would really deserve speaking at the center stage.

Graeme Rocher’s great session about Grails, polyglot datastores (hibernate, jpa, redis, mongodb, …), and the cloud was overshadowed by the news that Steve Jobs has died. Accidentally, the demo application was about showing a BBC News stream, which displayed this information live on stage. Both the presenter and the audience were equally touched.

The day officially ended with a big event at treasure island. I decided to not go there, though, and meet the former Canooey Denis Antonioli in Berkely where we had a great evening.

Dierk Koenig

The formal release of IntelliJ IDEA 10.5 came out this month, and the new Groovy features are all part of the free and open source Community Edition, and the Grails features are part of the Ultimate Edition. IDEA X (or 10 to you non-Romans) was a larger release of the product, and I already blogged about IDEA X for Groovy and IDEA X for Grails. There’s still plenty of nice features in 10.5 though. The prices for IDEA recently dropped between $100 and $50, and anyone purchasing IDEA since last November gets 10.5 as a free upgrade.

Here’s what 10.5 is all about (or skip straight to the release notes).

Groovy 1.8 Support
A big push in IDEA 10.5 was Groovy 1.8 support. Groovy 1.8 contains many compile time AST transformations that do things like write out new methods and fields into the Groovy .class files. Normal IDEs will show in-IDE compile errors when using these annotations yet still allow you to compile and execute the script. This has been fixed in IDEA, so the IDE should give you proper code completion and support when you use @Field, @TupleConstructor, and @Log. This is especially helpful when invoking these synthetic members from Java code.

Introduce Parameter and Introduce Field Refactorings
Introduce Parameter is one of my favorite refactorings. Select a local variable within a method, press Ctrl+Alt+P, and the local variable is extracted into a method parameter. It doesn’t yet work for closures, but you can vote for that feature. Introduce Field is also handy: select a local variable in either a method or a closure, press Ctrl+Alt+F, and the local variable is extracted into a field on the enclosing class. IDEA is not capable of extracting a field in a script yet, which would logically create an @Field script field, but feel free to upvote the issue.

Go To Test (and vice versa) Support
Tests and production source follows a naming convention, for example MyClass and MyClassTest. You can now press Ctrl+Shift+T to jump to the test (if you’re in production code) or jump to the production code (if you’re in the test). And if there is no test, then it will prompt you to create a new one. This works great in most cases. Of course, with Groovy it is not so rare to have several top-level classes in a single source file. In these cases the feature can sometimes get confused. Upvote the fix here if you want it to be just that much smarter in the future.

More Code Completion and Intentions
The “add static import” intention is nice for those who use a lot of static imports. Just set your cursor in a constant referenced from your code, press Alt+Enter, and viola… the constant is statically imported. Also, code completion is now available when creating an object using named parameters, which makes them a little easier to use. A whole bunch of other code completion issues were fixed as well, but these were technically marked as bugs not features. You can always peruse the release notes to see the whole story.

Performance
JetBrains claims that file indexing (typically at IDE startup) is now faster and that working with large Groovy files is more performant. It is hard for me to see a difference since I use the EAP versions and don’t currently work on any massive projects currently.

Grails Code Generation & Completion (Ultimate Edition)
Some small but nice things here. If you reference a controller action from a GSP, and that action does not exist, then pressing Alt+Enter creates an empty action for you. Also, the type inference for values on the GrailsPlugins has been improved, such as the closure parameters for doWithApplicationContext, doWithDynamicMethods, etc, and code completion for controllers and action in custom plugins are now discovered automatically. Finally, the code inside <r:script> tags from the Grails Resource plugin is now parsed as JavaScript, so full IDE JavaScript is available within them. This is supposed to become a standard for Grails 1.4, so it should continue to work with that release.

Improved Grails Resource Bundle and i18n Support
With 10.5, if you reference a property using the <g:message> tag in a GSP, and that property does not exist, then the property will be underlined in red and you’ll be given an Alt+Enter Intention to create it for you. Nifty. Also, the existing i18n intentions should now work better when you have GString syntax in your text. For instance, the string “Hello, ${user}” should now be properly handled when extracting to a resource bundle.

Various Usability Improvements
Last on the list are a few odds and ends around usability. Closures can now have the separator line between them in the IDE, the way methods show a line between them. GSP stacktraces have correct (and clickable) hyperlinks. The scripts folder is visible in the Grails view. And code navigation and formatting has been improved for several Grails Artefacts.

That’s it. Enjoy the upgrade, may your solid state disk never fail, and may your caches always be valid. Caio!

If you like this sort of thing, then there is also a whole bunch of other IDEA related content on my own blog and on the Canoo blog. Enjoy.

first of all, it is very helpful to familiarize yourself with your OS-specific keyboard commands for moving the cursor around and with the Shift key pressed, doing a selection. On Mac that is Cmd left/right for begin/end of line and Alt left/right for jumping over words. Of course you can use the mouse for selections but once you master the keystrokes, you will be faster and more precise.

is widening the current selection. That is, if you already have a selection, it expands it to the next enclosing syntactical scope (expression, statement, block). Without a selection, it starts a selection at the caret.

Mac users may expect Cmd W to close the current editor (internal window) as typical for mac applications, but that functionality is mapped to Cmd F4 in the standard keymap (somehow resembles the Windows keystroke).

I use widening most of the time to select a small expression precisely – often for later use in a refactoring. I start in the middle of the code and hit Cmd W repeatedly.

When selecting a larger block, let’s say a method or a whole class body, it’s efficient to place the cursor just after the opening brace and hit Cmd W just once to select the whole block.

surrounds the selection (or current line if there is no selection) with a live template. This features spares you the need for fiddling around with cursor positioning to put some code into an “if” block and the likes. I even made my own templates for surrounding a selection with parentheses, brackets (to make a literal Groovy list), braces (to make a closure or block), single quotes, and double quotes.

Especially putting quotes around a selection is nice since otherwise IDEA sometimes inserts pairs of quotes when it shouldn’t.

when you have a selection and open the context menu (right mouse click) you’ll see a “Compare with clipboard” entry, which opens the internal diffing view. Nice.

yanks out the current line. I use this a lot. It is quicker than selecting and deleting even when yanking many lines, since you can simply press the same keystroke again (remember the discussion about interaction design?).

duplicate the current line (or selection). Again, a much used shortcut for me for making variants of the current line or selection. Some Eclipse converts take issue with this one since they expect a delete action. (It’s worse when you get from IDEA to Eclipse and mistakingly delete a line that you want to duplicate, but then you deserve the pain)

comments the current line or selection with a line comment (//). This has a little gotcha when working with non-english keyboards where you need to press Shift to get to the slash character. With my swiss-german layout the shortcut is actually Cmd . (dot) because the dot is where the slash is on english keyboards (see also http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/IDEA-63779).

join the current line with next line. This shortcut is used by many text-editors. It is worth remembering. Much faster than a manual join.

moves the current line (or selection) one line up or down. This used to have issues in older versions when it tried to be too clever about which lines to jump over, e.g. when you select a whole method, it jumps not per-line but per-method. This makes sense for methods but other blocks are not as easy to support since you may want to nest them. The “intelligent” jumping sometimes led to unexpected results, especially in Groovy code. I haven’t seen any trouble with version X, yet.

the “insert explaining variable” refactoring is something you normally call on a selected expression but when there is no selection, it takes the current line as the expression. Now, this has an interesting effect: in a variable assignment, you never have to write the left-hand side! I learned this from IDEA uber-guru Vaclav Pech himself. It works like this: you don’t type “MyType myRef = expression” but only “expression” then strike Cmd Alt V. Try this and enjoy the effect.