Groovy and IDEA, a mixed blessing [Updated]

I’ve been an Intellij IDEA user from the very, very beginning. I think we bought some of the first licenses. I’ve been promoting IDEA against Eclipse cultures for years. IDEA is the most usable IDE around. I’ve got several companies I worked for to buy IDEA although they are Eclipse shops. I got all people in the team I manage to use IDEA instead of Eclipse. I converted Eclipse users. I’m an evangelist. I love IDEA!

Now I’ve been working on Grails for some time, thinking about using it in a project and deciding if it’s better than JS for the task. And the Groovy support in IDEA is very very bad. The plugin is not from Intellij, but it reflects badly on them. So I have to decide if I should use Grails for the project, drop IDEA and move to Eclipse or drop Grails and stay with IDEA. Groovy with the current plugin is no option in the long run. Going to the forums on the IntelliJ site reveal lots of discouraging comments by IntelliJ employees. Groovy seems to have a much lower priority than Scala (very nice, but who uses it?), Ruby, Python and JS. And that although Groovy seems a natural choice for Java. When I, a long time IDEA user drop IDEA as a Java developer, they will lose a customer from their core group (Java developers) which sounds stupid from a marketing and sales point of view.

What a difficult choice, but currently I lean on dropping IDEA, after all those years. What can the Grails/Groovy community, the users and developers do to get better support from IntelliJ?

Update (see comments): “Actually right now the situation regarding Groovy support has changed, which you may have found out from recent forum posts. We are no longer actively developing the Scala plugin, and the team responsible for it is now working on a new Groovy plugin.”

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