Archive for March 24th, 2008

My First Grails App is Live

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Unfortunately it’s unlikely you’ll be able to see it, unless you’re a college student in need of help verifiying your enrollment status to get a deal on a flight at Student Universe.

The core app is pretty small – it’s a web-based IM client/live chat that allows a student to talk with a Students Only agent. The Grails part is there to persist everything to the database. However the actual app is fairly involved though, since I added an admin interface, lots of tests, and a bunch of other stuff in anticipation of re-using a lot of it in the new product that we’re working on (stealth mode for now …)

One of the things that attracted me to Students Only was their use of Groovy and Grails. I’ve played with Groovy off and on for years but never had a good reason to write a real app using it. But Grails is rapidly gaining momentum and it’s certainly been a blast working with it.

I’m still partially on the fence about Grails vs a traditional Spring/Hibernate app because of the performance overhead of Groovy’s dynamic dispatch. The stack traces are staggeringly large, and I’m not sure how much of a productivity boost I’m getting out of Groovy or Grails personally. The cool thing though is that Grails is flexible enough that you’re not locked into anything – you can use JPA-annotated entities and DAOs instead of GORM, JSP instead of GSP, etc. if you find that the “Grails Way” isn’t enough for your needs.

Of course the coolest thing about Grails is the plugins – there are a ton of them and more are announced all the time.

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