CodeEditor 0.2.4 is Released!

CodeEditor 0.2.4 is released.

• Several UI bugs are fixed and UI performance is improved (upgraded to EditArea 0.8.1.1 )

• Action execution mechanism and console view to see result of these actions is added. You can reload controllers/filters and etc after editing its content from CodeEditor ui. There are default actions and you can customize actions to be executed from services/CodeEditorActionService.groovy file. Actions will be visible in Exec combo box in toolbar according to configured context.

• Default suggestion injection mechanism added to show dynamically injected methods in code completion. A default implementation is added you can customize and any method and property suggestion using conf/GroovyDefaultSuggestionConfig.groovy file
• Gsp code completion support is added.

You can download it from http://grails.org/plugin/code-editor. Documentation of these features did not finished yet. I will write a detailed documentation soon.

Also, in the next version version control system support will be added. It will help users to manage changes in production environments.

Why to use CodeEditor in Grails Applications?

Currently, There are many perfect IDEs  (Eclipse, IDEA, NetBeans) for groovy/grails project which has code completion, code refactoring, code formatting, syntax coloring and etc. So why developers need a tool like CodeEditor plugin?

1. It has no setup step. It is a simple grails plugin. You can install it onto any grails application.
2. It is accessible from web. You can work with CodeEditor in almost every browser.
3. You don’t need to forward any ports except the HTTP port.
4. You can edit a file and execute related actions with that file. For example if it is a controller you can reload controller and change the application behavior without reloading the whole application.
5. You don’t need to download/upload your code to change.
6. In many production environments accessing the server directly is not possible. CodeEditor enables users to access code without granting any access rights to server.
7. You can control whole application from CodeEditor menus including reloading and applying current changes. Executing other commands which can be configured in grails-app/services/CodeEditorActionService.groovy.
8. CodeEditor has code completion support. You can develop your code by the help of CodeEditor code completion suggestions easily.  Currently, only groovy files has code completion support but I am planning to add gsp, javascript and xml code completion features.

In near feature I want to add go to declaration tool, code formatting and simple code refactoring support.