Scott Leberknight's Weblog

Yesterday before leaving for home I happily upgraded the JetGroovy plugin to the latest and greatest version 1.0.14394 (on Mac OS X Leopard). Up until now, I've had great luck with this plug-in and have enjoyed using it to write Groovy code. Today, however, when I went to run several Groovy scripts I've been using while preparing a presentation, they failed with a rather nasty error:

java.lang.SecurityException: Prohibited package name: java.lang
...
...
...lots more stack trace gunk...

Uh oh. After doing some investigation on the JetBrains forums, the problem is that the JDK classes are being set in the Groovy classpath that IntelliJ passes to groovyStarter, which causes the security exception, presumably because Java thinks something is trying to add java.lang classes to the classpath. The issue is GRVY-1088 in JetBrains' JIRA tracker in case you are interested.

Fortunately a co-worker had not yet upgraded to the latest version and that version still works fine. In fact, that older version 1.0.14201 actually does not call groovyStarter but instead uses groovy.lang.GroovyShell to execute the script. So somewhere along the way the way JetGroovy runs Groovy scripts was completely changed to use groovyStarter but incorrectly passes all the JDK classes to it, causing the SecurityException. It actually works fine if you remove all the JDK classes from the classpath and run the command.

So the solution that has worked for me today is to downgrade to version 1.0.14201. You can find that version here. Just unzip it and replace the existing plug-in at ~/Library/Application Support/IntelliJIDEA70/Groovy and then you should be able to run Groovy scripts again from within IntelliJ. Of course this also means you cannot upgrade the plugin until GRVY-1088 is fixed.

I am not very good at the self-promotion thing, mainly because there are so many other people out there way, way smarter than I am. But in this case I'll make a small exception and mention that I'll be speaking next weekend at the Groovy/Grails Experience in Reston, VA giving a presentation called "Groovier Spring" in which I'll try to show how Groovy can make Spring-based applications more dynamic and flexible. Spring solves a bunch of underlying issues with the Java EE platform, for example dependency injection, resource and transaction management using AOP, and allowing applications to be tested more thoroughly and easily.

There is also a podcast on aboutGroovy in which I talk (or blather on, or ramble, or something like that) with Scott Davis about using Groovy together with Spring and talk about my talk, if that makes sense. You can hear it here on aboutGroovy.