Basic Questions

[bobbywarner]

I have two questions:

First, why does STS require a JDK when only a JRE is required for normal Eclipse? Specifically, why doesn't the Eclipse built-in compiler work for STS projects (Groovy/Grails/Roo)? Does it have something to do with Maven?

Second, why is Groovy and Grails support not included by default? I always have to enable the extensions. Groovy and Grails support should be in there automatically or at least a core installation option (like Spring Roo). Having them be extensions implies they are an afterthought and not as important as Spring Roo.


Thanks,
Bobby

[Martin Lippert]

Hey Bobby!

First, why does STS require a JDK when only a JRE is required for normal Eclipse? Specifically, why doesn't the Eclipse built-in compiler work for STS projects (Groovy/Grails/Roo)? Does it have something to do with Maven?

The JDK is required for the Maven Integration into Eclipse, it uses the JDK tools for some reason. I don't know the details behind this decision for the Maven Eclipse Integration, but it is the reason. So if you don't use Maven, the build-in compiler of Eclipse is, of course, used for Java and Roo projects. Groovy-Eclipse (and therefore also Grails projects) use a modified Eclipse compiler that is able to do Groovy compilation together with Java compilation, but that is all included in the Groovy-Eclipse implementation (and therefore also doesn't require a JDK).

Second, why is Groovy and Grails support not included by default? I always have to enable the extensions. Groovy and Grails support should be in there automatically or at least a core installation option (like Spring Roo). Having them be extensions implies they are an afterthought and not as important as Spring Roo.

I agree that having the extra installation step for Groovy/Grails is awkward for people using Groovy/Grails with STS. We decided this a while ago in order to not make the default distribution even bigger (it is already quite heavy) and at a time where we started with the Groovy/Grails support, so the majority of our users didn't need Groovy/Grails. But times have changed. The plan for STS 3.0 (shipping in July 2012) is to provide two distributions: The "Spring Tool Suite" and the "Groovy/Grails Tool Suite", where the Spring Tool Suite gives you everything if you are a Spring developer (Eclipse, Spring IDE, Roo support, tc Server integration, Maven integration, etc), whereas the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite gives you all the bits and pieces for Groovy/Grails: Eclipse, Groovy-Eclipse, Grails, tc Server integration, etc.). This will make it easy and straight forward for Groovy/Grails users to use this, just download and GO.

HTH,
Martin

[Kris De Volder]

Just a small correction to what Martin said.

The Grails tooling does require a JDK. This is because we are running grails commands via grails itself. Grails itself does *not* use the Greclipse compiler. So it does make use of the JDK compiler indirectly via some ant tasks it runs to compile stuff.

[rdevet]

So are there any plans to remove the JDK dependency from the tooling?

[Kris De Volder]

I don't think so because

1) This would be quite a difficult thing to do
2) Several components that introduce the dependency (e.g. maven support) are not under our direct control
3) it provides relatively little added value for the amount of work it would require.

Kris