Importing projects from IntelliJ IDEA to NetBeans

Googling for how to import an IntelliJ project into NetBeans didn’t turn up much information. NetBeans has a nice import tool form migrating from Eclipse — clearly, Sun knows who their competition is — but there’s nothing like that for other IDEs. And that makes sense: who would go back to a free IDE after shelling out for IntelliJ licenses? (Oh, the irony.)

This was kind of counter-intuitive to me, but what I learned is that it’s probably best to import a Groovy or Grails project as a Java Free-Form Project. The Free-Form Project lets you retain control of your build script (build.xml), rather than letting NetBeans alter it for you. It also lets you specify a number of project properties while you’re setting it up, including preferred JDK and classpath.

There’s also a plugin you can install, called Automatic Projects. With Automatic Projects installed, you can open any existing project, and NetBeans will simply scan the directory and configure project settings for itself.

I’m running into a problem. NetBeans doesn’t seem to want to allow me to create any new Java Free-Form Projects. It tells me “Project folder is already owned by NetBeans project my_project_name.” What is that about?

Do any experienced NetBeans users have any suggestions on what I’m doing wrong? Is this related to Project Groups perhaps?

#ide, #intellij-idea, #netbeans

How To Run or Debug Grails on Tomcat in NetBeans?

My question.

A partial answer.

#grails, #groovy, #ide, #netbeans

I broke NetBeans

NetBeans Issue 159244

#ide, #netbeans

Migrating from IntelliJ IDEA to NetBeans

IDE support for Groovy and Grails is still evolving.

In 2008, most of the developers I talked to seemed to think that IntelliJ IDEA was the best IDE for working with Grails. JetBrains was nice enough to give all of my company’s developers who attended one of Scott Davis’ classes a complimentary one-year license for IntelliJ IDEA, and so most of our department has standardized on it. But IntelliJ IDEA is not free, and we couldn’t get the company bean counters to approve the budget to renew our licenses, since they know that free alternatives exist.

Before IntelliJ IDEA, we were mostly an Eclipse shop, and if necessary, we could go back to it. But we’ve been hearing good things about the new Groovy and Grails support in NetBeans, so I’ve undertaken to try it out. I’ll post about my experiences here.

#grails, #groovy, #ide, #intellij-idea, #netbeans