The Best Groovy Inspections You’re Not Using

Many, many tools perform static analysis on code. There are all sorts of automated ways to look through your code and tell you if there are likely errors or not. FindBugs, PMD, and CheckStyle are some of the big names from the Java world. On the Groovy side we have two real options: IntelliJ IDEA and CodeNarc.

This post (over on the Canoo Blog) highlights my favorite static analysis rules for Groovy in IDEA that are not enabled by default. Groovy in IDEA 11 has well over 100 rules, but less than half of them are activated when you install the product. To turn these rules on you’ll need to go into Settings (Ctrl+Alt+S) and enable them under Inspections.

So surf over to the main post and check it out. If you want to leave a comment, then do it on the DZone page. I've been turning comments off on the main posts.

If you like this then you might check out some of my other IDEA related posts: The 10 Best Inspections You’re Not Using (in Java), or the IDEA archive on my blog and the Canoo blog.

And remember if you need Groovy and Grails help, then give me a call or drop me an email at hamlet.darcy@canoo.com

Android Testing in IntelliJ IDEA

Google’s Android site has some fairly detailed instructions for testing Android applications… from Eclipse. They were nice enough to supply a “Testing from Other IDEs” page, but that is nothing more than instructions on using Ant and the command line. Well, if you are using IntelliJ IDEA then you already believe the IDE is going to be a better tool than Ant for this. It’s easy to set up a test project in IDEA and get your tests running. Here are some simple instructions.

As usual, the full post is over on the Canoo website. Wanna be cool about it? Upvote it at DZone or Reddit.

Thanks for paying attention.

IntelliJ IDEA 11 for the Groovy Developer

IntelliJ IDEA 11 was released a few weeks ago, and it contains quite a few new features for the Groovy developer. Everything listed in my blog post is in the free and open source Community Edition of IntelliJ IDEA. There are plenty of new Grails features as well, but I wanted to separate out the Ultimate Edition features into a different post.

To read the full post, surf on over to the Canoo Blog: http://www.canoo.com/blog/2011/12/20/intellij-idea-11-for-the-groovy-developer/

And, as usual, you can vote for this thing over at DZone.

Thanks everyone.

The Art of Groovy Command Expressions in DSLs

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are often littered with the accidental complexity of the host language. Have you ever seen a supposedly “friendly” language expression like “ride(minutes(10)).on(bus).towards(Basel)”. The newest version of Groovy contains a language feature that aims to eliminate the noise of all those extra periods and parenthesis, so that your DSL looks more like “ride 10.minutes on bus towards Basel”. This article shows you step-by-step how to use Groovy Command Expressions and plain old metaprogramming to write just this DSL, and also offers advice on when, and when not, to use this new language feature.

The full article is available over on the Canoo Blog: http://www.canoo.com/blog/2011/12/08/the-art-of-groovy-command-expressions-in-dsls/

And of course you can upvote in all the usual places.

Until next time...