Setup Groovy in Eclipse

Groovy came in my Test Automation life here in Persado in order to make my daily life more easy and also make my coding more exciting. In this post I will present the way Groovy became part of my IDE, in order to start "groovy"ing.

Firstly, I installed the eclipse Groovy plugin, this was a piece of cake since I was only a few of steps away of it. Via the Marketplace of my Spring Tool Suite (STS): Help - Eclipse Marketplace - Search for Groovy -Install

Install Groovy plugin

Groovy plugin for eclipse can be also found under the following URL: Groovy Plugin for Eclipse

Since, the first step was completed, I moved to the second one and I created a new Groovy class by following the path in Eclipse: File - New - Other - Groovy - Groovy Class.

New Groovy class

  
My java code was already under a Maven project, so I followed the standard maven approach and placed my Groovy classes under src/main/groovy and src/test/groovy and keep my Java classes under src/main/java and src/test/java structure.

Maven Structure

HINT: In case the Groovy folders /src/test/groovy and /scr/main/groovy are not displayed, select your project and by right clicking select Build Path - Configure Build Path - Add Folder then include the folders on your view as:

Display Groovy Folders

Then, as a third step, I converted my project to a Groovy one by just selecting my project then by right clicking on option Configure - Convert to Groovy Project.

Convert to Groovy

Moving forward, I thought that I need to adapt Groovy in my maven word in order to compile my Groovy classes.
In order to achieve it, in the pom.xml, I included the dependency tag for Groovy:

<dependencies>
   <dependency>
     <groupId>org.codehaus.groovy</groupId>
     <artifactId>groovy-all</artifactId>
     <version>${groovyVersion}</version>
   <dependency>
 </dependencies> 

also, i needed a Groovy plugin with the goal “generateStubs”,so included the following tags:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.gmaven</groupId>
    <artifactId>gmaven-plugin</artifactId>
      <configuration>
       <providerSelection>1.8</providerSelection>
      </configuration>
        <executions>
         <execution>
           <goals>
           <goal>generateStubs</goal>
           <goal>compile</goal>
           <goal>generateTestStubs</goal>
           <goal>testCompile</goal>
           </goals>
         </execution>
       </executions>
</plugin>

The goal "generateStubs" was I a surprise for me when I realized that, as its name dedicate,creates java stubs of groovy classes.To understand it, consider a java class which needs a Groovy one to compile with and since maven standard compile process starts with /main and /test java packages and then with the /main and /test Groovy packages, compilation would stop with errors without it.

Finally, on my maven project i run Maven target "clean Install" to install all the dependencies and compile my source Java and Groovy code and i was ready to start rocking with Groovy…..That's all folks!!

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