NetBeans

Of the popular IDE environments, NetBeans was the first to provide built-in Groovy support. From NetBeans 6.5 onwards, Groovy support is available from within any of the Java bundles without any additional plugins being required. By default, you have excellent Groovy source editing with syntax highlighting, source folding, and code completion. You can mix and match Groovy with Java in your projects, or build a full Groovy on Grails-based project from scratch. You can download the latest NetBeans installation from https://netbeans.org/downloads/.

Eclipse

Eclipse was the first Java IDE to have Groovy support integrated through the Groovy-Eclipse plugin. You can install the Groovy-Eclipse plugin from the update site at http://dist.springsource.org/snapshot/GRECLIPSE/e4.5/.

The Groovy-Eclipse plugin has full support for source-level Groovy editing with syntax highlighting, auto completion, and refactoring.

Spring STS

If you don't want the hassle of managing individual plugins in your Eclipse installation, then it's worth downloading and installing the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite from http://spring.io/tools.

IntelliJ IDEA

All the latest versions of IntelliJ IDEA have excellent built-in support for Groovy, including excellent support for Grails, Gradle, and Spock. For the purpose of most of the examples in this book, the free Community Edition of IntelliJ IDEA is sufficient for your needs.

Other IDEs and editors

Other IDEs with Groovy support are JDeveloper and JEdit. In addition, many of the popular program editors, such as TextMate and UltraEdit, also now have Groovy support. There is even a plugin available to download for Emacs. Check out http://www.groovy-lang.org/ides.html for a full list of available plugins, and extensive instructions on setting up and running Groovy in your preferred environment.