Groovy and Grails

During my vacation I did a bit of development in Grails. I have to say I’m pretty pleased with the result. I did a small app for creating offers,orders and generating an invoice from these. I migrated my old postgresql data to the new mysql schema.

I know there are already opensource tools out there who do this. But I wanted to try this technology to build something. Why not something I could use myself.

Grails uses the same ideas as rails but uses the Groovy language. This language leans more towards Java (and actually is just an extra layer on top of Java). I have to say that once you get the hang of it you’re actually more productive using this technology. But off course there is a downside. If you have an existing database with data you could have problems mapping these things using Grails. Grails uses Hibernate underneath but some things are not straight forward, e.g. if you want to use the scaffolding feature make sure your domain class has an id property otherwise you could get into trouble. This looks straightforward but some of my classes had an invoiceId instead of id property.

For the next stuff I’m going to build a Flex frontend. I already did some appz using Flex but there’s still plenty of stuff to learn and the opensource components are growing every day so …

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