After months of anticipation from developers worldwide, the JetGroovy and Ruby productivity plugins for IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 are here. The JetGroovy plugin makes available IntelliJ IDEA's award-winning productivity features and support to Groovy and Grails.

• Cross-language support, which lets you develop applications both in Groovy and Java, with all features supported seamlessly, as well as to compile your project in a single step
• Built-in debugger for both Groovy and Java code
• Smart, context-sensitive GDK-aware code completion with cross-resolution between Groovy and Java
• Syntax highlighting, code formatting and folding
• Error highlighting for unresolved classes, unresolved unqualified properties, incompatible type assignments, method calls, and more
• Auto-insertion of imports statements, parameter info, etc.
• Refactorings, advanced navigation and views
• GSP support with Grails tags and inline Groovy coding assistance
• Dedicated Visual Application Model editor for Grails
• Automatic generators for Grails controllers, views, domain classes, jobs, script and more

Ruby developers will, likewise, benefit from the following productivity-boosting features and support:

• Advanced coding assistance with smart code completion, including RHTML
• JRuby support, with coding assistance and navigation
• Syntax highlighting, code formatting and folding
• On-the-fly code inspections with error highlighting and one-click quick-fixes
• TestUnit and RSpec test frameworks support
• Ruby and Rails live and file templates plus intention actions
• Refactorings, advanced navigation and views
• Automatic generators for Rails skeletons, actions and Ruby access modifiers
• Run configurations for Ruby and Rails applications, with various application servers support

JetGroovy and Ruby plugins are supported only in this IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.2 maintenance release. Users of older versions can find their upgrade plan or consider 30-day free fully functional trial for evaluation. To access the plugins or get more information, use the IntelliJ IDEA Plugin Repository or the built-in IntelliJ IDEA Plug-in Manager.

I gave it a testrun at the weekend, the Groovy support is the best currently in existence, refactoring works in both ways, and mixing groovy and java on the fly is a no brainer either, thanks to groovys excellent stub precompilation feature. I would love to see this level of excellence in the other IDEs.

I second all that. If Groovy/Grails support was anywhere near as good in Eclipse, I wouldn't be switching to IntelliJ IDEA. I still hope the Eclipse plugin matures into something half as good as JetGroovy. I am enjoying Groovy so much that I am becoming one of those people who'd rather program in Groovy with notepad or vi than in Java with Eclipse or IntelliJ. So even if you are not interested in switching to IntelliJ, do yourself a favor and add Groovy to your toolbox.