And the Winner is...

...STS

The first task I will try and document is setting up a development machine. I have a nice vanilla 64-bit Windows 7 PC with almost nothing installed. Not even a JDK. The first decision I made is to use Grails, current production version, 2.0.4. The second decision was more difficult, which IDE? I haven't worked in Eclipse for quite awhile. I used to have a total Sun fascination including using NetBeans. There is definitely a pun to be made but I'll restrain myself. If Grails support was included in the community edition of IntelliJ IDEA it would receive strong consideration. One of the reasons I chose STS is there are a lot of resources available to help me learn to use the software. This webinar recording got me excited to get going.

Groovy and Grails Applications with the SpringSource Tool Suite

When I went to download STS I noticed the following:

The following pre-requisites must be fulfilled in order to install STS:

• Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7, Apple Mac OS X, Linux
• Java Runtime: latest version of JDK 5 or 6 (a JRE will not be enough to use all STS features)
• Hardware: 500MB free disk space, 2GB memory

Now I have another decision to make. Is there any reason I wouldn't use Java 6? Additional research may be required. I grabbed the STS version that needs a 64-bit JDK so off to find me some Java. Interesting discovery, I noticed the JRE installed on my 64-bit operating system is a 32-bit version. Might as well get rid of that while I am in setup mode. Wow, Oracle just informed me that 3 billion devices run Java. JDK 6 installed. While installing STS 2.9.2 I have another question. Should I let it install their app server? I am used to Grails having a built-in app server. Do I need vFabric tc Server 2.7.0? I am going to skip it and Maven for now.

Perfect timing, it is 11:00pm.