With the release last week of Groovy 1.7, developers using the object-oriented scripting language for Java gained access to anonymous inner classes and nested classes, annotations, SQL and other features that could simplify development when mixing Groovy code with Java. Groovy's Eclipse community yesterday released Groovy-Eclipse 2.0.0, a nearly rewritten plug-in that it says delivers an Eclipse experience the same as when using Java.
"The driving themes for version 2.0.0 have always been to optimize around the common developer actions of editing, building, running and testing code," wrote Groovy language developer Andrew Eisenberg in a post describing the release. To that end, editing is enhanced in the release with support of task tags,javadoc hovers and cross-language refactoring. The tool also offers context-aware editor suggestions and content assist through an extensible inferencing engine. Builds are aided thanks to a "stub-less incremental joint compilation process, [in which] we use a modified Groovy parser that is more recoverable than the standard parser," which Eisenberg said enables the language to be "more stable in the face of partially correct code."
Groovy-Eclipse 2.0.0, according to
release notes, also now supports launching and debugging of applications and scripts, "even for code using transforms such as @Grab," which can be used to insert source files. Version 2 also now fully integrates with JUnit. Groovy is licensed under Apache.