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Upcoming Grails Presentation at Charlotte JUG

Posted by Jason Rudolph on February 14th, 2007

If you'll be in or around Charlotte, NC on February 21st and you're interested in Grails (or perhaps you're not yet interested, but you're looking for ways to speed up your web development efforts), make plans to drop by the Charlotte Java User Group where I'll be presenting an introduction to Grails.  At 6:30 PM, the meeting will kick off with a round of lightning talks, which is a great way to hear about new and interesting things that folks are doing with Java (and Java-related technologies).  Then, we'll get into Grails, and be sure to leave some time for Q & A as well.

Once again, I'll have free Groovy and Grails books to give away.  I'll be handing out several copies of both The Definitive Guide to Grails (by Graeme Rocher) and Groovy in Action (by Dierk Koening, et al).  If you're in the area, reserve your spot, and come check out one of the the Java platform's most exciting up-and-coming technologies.   

Many thanks to Apress and Manning for their kind support.

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3 Responses to “Upcoming Grails Presentation at Charlotte JUG”

  1. Jeremie Weldin Says:
    February 22nd, 2007 at 11:24 am

    Thanks again for giving your presentation at the Charlotte JUG. It was well worth the drive.

  2. Jeremie Weldin Says:
    February 22nd, 2007 at 11:45 am

    Also, I was searching to see if GORM could be used for desktop applications as well, since I have a rather large application that shares a model between web and desktop applications. I came across this blog post and wondered if you had any responses to it? Have any of the issues that he mentions been resolved?

  3. Jason Rudolph Says:
    February 25th, 2007 at 8:47 pm

    Hi Jeremie, Seven hours in the car to see a presentation on Grails - that’s enthusiasm, Man! Awesome! Thanks for making the trip.

    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.

    –

    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.

    –

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

    Cheers, Jason

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