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I have been reading Groovy, and I'm half way down. I started to love groovy a lot, and apply it to solve some simple real world problem; As I love building web applications, i would go for reading Grails webframework as I know Groovy.

But If I want to build desktop-applications, which framework will be the good choice? I wanted to create a simple IDE for Groovy language(or say for any language), that can do syntax highlighting and other kind of stuffs.As mentioned earlier, I love Groovy a lot when compared to Java; And Griffon is a framework that is built on Groovy, mainly for creating Desktop-appplications. But I didn't find enough resources for Griffon!

Is Griffon is the good framework for those people who know and love Groovy(as I do)? Can I choose it for building a simple IDE as mentioned above? Or there are any other framework that is built on Groovy, which is good when compare to Griffon?

sriram
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The problem I have found with Griffon is that a number of the plugins are a bit out of date in that they aren't using the latest UI libraries (e.g. Flamingo, Substance, and SwingXBuilder, altho I think this has just been upgraded to use SwingX 1.6).

I am using SwingBuilder directly, with a few extensions I have added via my own builder implementation:

http://code.google.com/p/ousia

If you want to build an IDE I can recommend the RSyntaxTextArea component, as it has great support for many programming languages and is pretty simple to use:

http://fifesoft.com/rsyntaxtextarea/

fortuna
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  • thanks for sharing the **RSyntaxTextArea** component in the answer! – sriram Apr 12 '11 at 06:48
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    SwingBuilder is built into Groovy itself and makes building Swing UIs much simpler: http://groovy.codehaus.org/Swing+Builder SwingXBuilder is a Griffon plugin and provides support for extra components from the SwingX library: http://griffon.codehaus.org/SwingXBuilder – fortuna Apr 12 '11 at 06:53
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Griffon is a fairly good MVC based framework, and is built on top of Java Swing. So it can do anything that Swing can do.

To be honest I found Griffon a little too much for relatively simple UIs, so I usually write my apps in Groovy using SwingBuilder directly.

If you really want to get into Griffon I recommend getting the Book Griffon in Action It seems to be the only place where everything is documented, although the web page is coming along and improving all the time.

Jim Morris
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  • nice, but there are anyother frameworks like griffon built on groovy? – sriram Apr 12 '11 at 04:08
  • Not that I know of, however take a look at SwingBuilder and things like MigLayout and GlazedLists, with these tools using Groovy and Swingbuilder directly is much easier IMHO than using a framework. – Jim Morris Apr 12 '11 at 04:16
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There are definitely various resources out there that will let you learn more about Griffon, for example the Griffon Guide -> http://dist.codehaus.org/griffon/guide/index.html

"Griffon in Action" is another popular resource which you can buy in electronic form today; being the author of both makes me a little biased ;-)

You can keep up to date on Griffon news by following the mailing lists and @theaviary on Twitter

Andres Almiray
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