Grails plugin not working on Netbeans IDE?

Quick history, I wanted to develop a Grails applciation and learn Groovy and Grails asap so that I could develop a web-app in less than an hour. Sounds crazy? I don’t think so. With Grails, Rails around, it doesn’t sound so crazy. Finally, I ended up spending a day configuring IDE at my work, although I could configure it within 5 min later at home.

Here is the deal (My experience): Since, I haven’t worked on Eclipse at all, it never worked for me. I had issues configuring Ganymeda, Callista, Grails etc etc and I really got fed up. I have been a fan of Netbeans for a long time (About 3 years now, from my Undergraduate project) and I read somewhere that Eclipse support for Grails is much better than that of Netbeans. But, I finally decided to give Netbeans a shot. Here is the process (It literally took me about 2 minutes to get it running)

1. Download Grails, Groovy(.exe), and Groovy Documentation. Keep them in C:\ . Install Groovy.
2. Netbeans -> Tools -> Plugin -> Select and Install.
3. Set Groovy documentation and Grails installation in Tools -> Option -> Miscellaneous -> Groovy
4. New Project -> Groovy
5. You have it. If you need a plugin, right-click on the Project and select Plugin.

Now, if you get an error something like,

Unable to list plug-ins, please check you have a valid internet connection.  OR error reading plugin-list. Check your Internet Connnection.

Then, the chances are that your grails proxy is not configured. What can you do? (Opening up the Grails Shell from Netbeans and trying to configure it may not work)

1. Check if you can connect to internet from Firefox (Configuring proxy in IE is as creepy as trying to marry Bill gates’ daughter).
2. Then, go to Firefox -> Tools -> Options -> Advance -> Network. Note down your proxy configuration.
3. Open cmd. (Start -> Run -> cmd). Type in the command, ‘grails set-proxy’. Set appropriate Host Server (Default will be localhost and you may have to change it).
4. If cmd reports that grails command is not found or something like that, then you will have to set GROOVY_HOME and GRAILS_HOME environment variables in your Windows machine. How? Read further.
5. Start -> (right-click on) My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Environment Vriables ->Click New (Under System Variables)
6. Check and if you don’t find GRAILS_HOME and GROOVY_HOME, then type GRAILS_HOME and the path.
7. Add GRAILS and GROOVY path to PATH variable. PATH-> Edit -> Add to the end ‘;%GROOVY_HOME/bin;%GRAILS_HOME/bin;’

Once everything is configured, it brings us to Grails programming tutorials. Please let me know when you can teach me as I have just started learning it myself. Chao!