You asked about the use of GORM for desktop apps: There’s been a lot of interest in using GORM outside of Grails (and rightfully so). Most recently, Graeme offered some guidance for doing so on the mailing list. There’s also been talk of including GORM in Groovy itself, though I can’t seem to track down anything discussing that prospect at the moment.

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You asked for my response to Brian Pontarelli’s thoughts on Grails and whether any of his concerns have been addressed. Here goes…

Grails command-line utility is based on Ant. This seems really cumbersome to me since Ant is the complete opposite from a CLI framework. Some of the more annoying things are the lack of CLI switches and lack of the ability to pass parameters.

The command line utility now uses Gant and does indeed allow users to pass parameters.

Second of all, the code generation uses tabs.

Fair enough. We should fix this one. I do however wish Brian would have opted to log a JIRA issue to reflect this suggestion.

Okay, next annoyance… In Rails you can add new controllers and domains as you go. In Grails you can’t add new controllers or domains. Well, I’m not positive on the domain front, but it seems that way since if you can’t add controllers you might be able to add a domain, but probably won’t be able to do anything with it. This really slows development time down compared to Rails. This means a server restart each time you add something new.

This is certainly a legitimate gripe, and we very much want to provide a productive and pleasant developer experience. Grails 0.4.2 addresses most (if not all) of the issues that previously required a server restart. Any such remaining issues should be addressed in the near future.

Next, I never harp on naming except right now. This is something they have to change for everyone who uses Linux, a shell and the tab key (or if you use XP and cygwin). There are two directories in the root of the project that have the same prefix: brian@brian-desktop:~/dev/java/grails-tests/grails-hibernate-test$ ll total 36 drwxr-xr-x 9 brian brian 4096 2006-09-25 14:03 grails-app drwxr-xr-x 2 brian brian 4096 2006-09-25 20:55 grails-tests … This must change and really there is absolutely no reason these should not be named app and test. The fact that I can’t type in one or two characters and then hit tab is REALLY annoying and very slow.

The Grails dev team has discussed this issue, and we agree that this issue is both annoying and should change. I’ll have to check to see where that issue resides on the list of priorities.

Oh the evil copy issue! It bites everyone at some point and it seems that Grails decided to use this as there preferred mechanism. They apparently make a copy of the web app to a dir called tmp and run it from there.

This issue was addressed as part of Grails 0.4.

I’ve had a lot of issues with Hibernate including collections, sessions/transactions and of course the nasty session corruption issue that I haven’t written about yet, but a lot of folks have issues with where things like a unique key violation will completely kill the session making the use of open session in view filter very difficult.

The first part of the comment above is somewhat vague, so I’m not sure what the exact issues are that Brian experienced; however, I do indeed recall issues with the unique constraint. Those issues were addressed in Grails 0.4.1.

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I hope this helps. Thanks again for making the trip.

Cheers, Jason