Groovy On The JVM 

http://www.juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2006/05/17/groovy-on-the-jvm/

Posted May 17, 2006, Juixe TechKnow

I attended the Groovy = Java Tech ` Ruby ` Python for the JVM session. This is a simple equation that makes a lot of sense to me, especially since I develop a lot of Groovy scripts at work. This session was a 101 introduction to groovy. Rob Cope of OpenLogic did a great job at describing the dynamic aspect of Groovy, Closures, Groovy Markup builders such as AntBuilder and XmlBuilder, and the the GDK extensions.

For those not familiar to Groovy. Groovy is a object-oriented dynamic language that runs on the JVM. In Groovy, static typing and semicolons are optional. Groovy has a lot of built-in features missing in Java, such as regular expressions. A great feature of groovy is that it compiles to a class file which can be used in a Java application. According to Rob, "your boss can't tell if you are using Groovy."

The one feature of Groovy that I was not at all familiar with was the Scriptom. Scriptom gives you access to COM objects, in a fashion that is similar to VBScript developers. Rob shows demoed Scriptom, he opened Microsoft Excel added values, created a chart, saved the chart to the file system, created a JFrame with a button that use the chart as an icon. More amazing is that he did this without restarting or closing or rebuilding anything.

I am seriously thinking of replacing all our VBscript dependencies from our application. We use VBScript to open and print Word and Excel documents. With Groovy and Scriptom I could do this in the JVM.

*Tags*: javaone, java, groovy, closures, scriptom, vbscript

documented on: 2008-02-09

Grails: A Java web application in minutes 

No Fluff Just Stuff have put up a great video interview explaining Grails and why it rocks. http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/media.jsp?mediaId=22 It's really worth watching, even if you know Grails. It helped me focus on the benefits of Grails for users other than myself :)

Also, another one of the Grails developers reminded us in an email last week that it's easy for us to forget the power of Grails' agility in terms of getting from 0-60 in record time. I often have my head buried in my client projects or Grails internals, and sometimes forget this because I'm so used to it and working on existing projects.

So maybe it's worth a little repeat session. Here's a working web-app in minutes, based on Java, using Java code/libs if you want them, with Groovy glue code (or all your code for those bitten by the dynamic languages bug like me):

  1. Download and install Grails 0.4.2

  2. Open up a console/shell window

  3. Change to a directory where you want to create a project.

  4. Run: grails create-project GrailsTest

  5. Run: cd GrailsTest

  6. Run: grails create-controller Hello

  7. Edit: GrailsTest/grails-app/controllers/HelloController.groovy to read: 

       class HelloController {
       def index = { render "Hello world" }
   }
8. Run: grails run-app
9. Browse to http://localhost:8080/GrailsTest/hello

Of course this is trivial as it isn't a full tutorial. So what do you have here? A web application that:

and there's so much more! Compare the time taken to create this working application, literally a handful of minutes, to the last time you started a new web-app project in Java using any framework.

Spend one lunch hour trying Grails and you may well be running to your project manager in the afternoon foaming at the mouth.

documented on: March 27th, 2007, Graeme Rocher

Grails Gathers Steam, Heads for 1.0 

http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/05/grails-gathers-steam

In the past few years, web frameworks have increasingly been focused on productivity. Ruby on Rails is seen by many as the poster-child for rapid web development, which has put a lot of pressure on traditional frameworks. In the Java marketplace, a number of frameworks are responding to that call by aiming for increased productivity, rapid development, and support for scripting languages. From Grails to Stripes, RIFE to Trails, Tapestry 5.X and Phobos, there are a lot of people looking for new ways to make Java web development a productive, rapid environment for building web applications that scale.

Grails, a Rails-style web framework using Groovy on the Java platform, has been getting a lot of attention lately, with a rapidly growing community and increasing production use for major corporations including Tropicana and Pepsico. Grails is often compared to Ruby on Rails, which is both an opportunity and a challenge, as people are attracted to the power of a Rails-like framework on a familiar platform, but may move on to Rails itself. A recent set of comparisons imply that Grails has the edge on performance for now, but that new releases of Ruby promise better performance across the board, and that may change.

Although there has been some discussion about support for Ruby within Grails, it doesn't currently seem likely. If, instead of integrating Ruby with Grails, you'd like to integrate parts of Grails with your other applications, it is apparently possible to use the Grails object/relational mapper, GORM, outside of a Grails context, such as in a Java desktop application. All of the major IDEs are showing signs of increased support for Groovy and Grails. There's been some discussion of IDE support in Netbeans, as well as discussion of improvements for GroovyJ in IDEA. Eclipse has the beginnings of a Grails plugin and new releases of the Groovy/Eclipse plugin and Edward Povazan working on improved code completion support with Big Sky Technology.

Grails recently released version 0.5, with improved performance, custom URLs, enhancements to GORM and more. Next on the roadmap is 0.6, with a 1.0 release late in the year. InfoQ spoke with Graeme Rocher, a co-founder and the project lead for Grails about its current success and the future.

When asked about the recent surge in attention for Grails, Graeme responded:

Well, Java developers all over are being made aware that configuration is no longer a necessary activity and Grails is one of the frameworks leading this surge. However, in comparison to other frameworks, Grails has a really strong message around re-using your existing Java knowledge, infrastructure, and code. Grails is as elegant as Rails, but as flexible as Spring MVC or Seam. It really does provide the best of both worlds. As to the uptake, that has really been lead by our community and world of mouth. We spent over a year putting together a 0.1 release; if it had been mediocre no one would have paid any attention. As it is, we have many happy users who are spreading the word and increasing Grails' mindshare.

When comparing Grails to other frameworks for building web applications in Java:

Well, it really embraces DRY and convention-over-configuration. You really have pretty much zero configuration when developing a Grails application. However, you get all of this AND tight Java integration with existing APIs, libraries and frameworks like the Java Enterprise stack, Spring, Hibernate & SiteMesh.

In addition it has a number of key selling points. Including an extensible plug-in system, a domain-driven ORM layer built on Hibernate, and a powerful view technology with Groovy Server Pages (GSP).

On convincing someone to try Grails for the first time:

Developers don't really need a lot of convincing, it is more management that is the struggle. However, if I do want to convince people to use Grails, I just do a quick 5 minute demo and they're sold.

As to where Grails goes next, for v1.0 and therafter, Graeme Rocher said:

We're really focusing on improving the developer experience and getting out 1.0 by autumn time. We have only a few "big" jobs left and then it is just incremental improvements to reach the finishing line. Some things that we have left to do are for example JSP tag library support in GSP, possible support for JPA as a plug-in, and improvements to our unit testing infrastructure.

Overall though we are mainly focused on getting 1.0 out the door after that we'll look at leveraging the infrastructure we have in place and writing many plug-ins for Grails to continue to improve the developer experience. For example I really want to get round to writing a Groovy compiler for GWT that hooks into Grails as a plug-in, which should be fun.

If you'd like to learn more about Grails, you can continue to read about Grails at InfoQ, or take a look at Grails website, read Getting Started with Grails or the Definitive Guide to Grails.

http://www.infoq.com/grails/ http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GRAILS/Home http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/grails http://www.javalobby.org/articles/definitive-guide-to-grails/

documented on: May 01, 2007, by Geoffrey Wiseman

10 Reasons to Switch from Rails to Grails 

http://raincitysoftware.blogspot.com/2007/12/10-reasons-to-switch-from-rails-to.html

After spending a few years really enjoying Rails it was difficult to bring myself to even try groovy and grails. But my latest contract forced me to look for alternatives, and I'm glad I did. Here are some reasons that you may want to switch…

  1. GORM with hibernate/spring and jpa is much better than ActiveRecord

  2. No distribution problems; runs in many production ready containers

  3. Internationalization out of the box (not specifically ignored as DHH does)

  4. Transactions actually work, and they include save-points.

  5. Not only dynamic finders and counters, but dynamic listOrderBy

  6. No green threads (although this may be fixed in Ruby 2.0, around 2010?)

  7. Ability to use pessimistic locking out of the box

  8. Real-live prepared statements and .withCriteria method

  9. Production level test reporting with built in Mocking and Stubbing

  10. Search operations are based on Lucene (with a plugin)

All of these don't make sense for a non-java coder. And my startup time for grails would have be much longer without my prior experience with Rails and Ruby.

One thing I thought I might be giving up was the endless list of valuable gems that make developing in Rails a real pleasure. But after re-reviewing the list of open source products from apache, java source, spring, hibernate, and even Sun (glassfish), I can't think of any gems that I will miss.

documented on: December 30, 2007, by darryl.west

The Great Grails Switch 

The Apple Switch Ad campaign was very successful for Apple, so much so that there seems to be a sort of switch meme campaign amongst Grails folks to try to get Ruby on Rails developers to switch to Grails. Originally this blog post presented 10 reasons to switch from Rails to Grails and now Graeme Rocher of G2One has added another ten. Here is the complete list of reasons to switch to Grails… or at least top reasons to give Grails a try…

For the true die hard Ruby on Rails developers this might not be reason enough to switch to Grails, but for those Java developers on that are on the fence Grails might seem a bit more attractive now.

For those interested in getting started with Grails, take a look at my Groovy and Grails tutorials. http://www.juixe.com/techknow/index.php?s=groovy http://www.juixe.com/techknow/index.php?s=grails

*Tags*: apple, switch campaign, groovy, grails, rails, webdev, development

documented on: January 10, 2008, Juixe TechKnow