GroovyVan.com // Vancouver Groovy/Grails UG

Welcome to the Vancouver Groovy/Grails User Group Q&A series. Today let’s welcome back Vancouverite Ed Povazan discussing Grails – Groovy’s web framework – and tips on how to get started with Groovy and Grails and more.

Q: How did you get started on Grails? What makes Grails your framework of choice for web applications using Java?

Ed Povazan: Grails parallels my Groovy experience. I can learn new things at my own pace. All I have to learn is some concepts and conventions, and then I can quickly test them out interactively. My previous experience was mostly with thick client apps. I seem to be one of the few who think Swing is a wonderfully powerful and fast widget toolkit! So when I
started looking into web apps, Grails gave me my first simple web app in minutes, and from then on, learning a bit at a time. No new concept requires learning a deluge of other concepts. Small changes are independent, no messing around in XML, no configure this and that.

Q: What’s next for Groovy and Grails? Any features or functionality you’re looking forward or you want to highlight from the upcoming Groovy 1.1 or Grails 1.0 releases? Anything missing?

Ed Povazan: I’ve had my head in my current project for 3+ months and we are still using Grails 0.5.6. So I really look forward to catch up on the latest Grails 1.0 and Groovy 1.1 updates. Groovy plays well in a very large and diverse ecosystem, I’ve only explored but a small area. Grails is no different with an ever expanding selection of plugins.

Q: Any tips, tricks or advice for developers getting started with Groovy and Grails?

Ed Povazan: I can describe how I started – I pretty much cut and paste some Java code, removed all semicolons, and then stared at my new ‘Groovy’ code, and started applying Groovy features where I could see a chance to. Over time, as I learnt more, I would review this same code and find more places where I could use Groovy features. I did some
strange things with Groovy. I actually implemented some image processing code in Groovy. It was hilariously slow, however because I was able to express the algorithms succinctly with the help of a few Category classes, I had them working in a very short amount of time. I also had nice clean code with which to add a few extra features. I ported it all to Java – the final code is code only a C programmer could love, but blazingly fast. There is no way I could have done this quicker has I started in Java alone.

As for Grails, install it, go through a small tutorial. In no time at all you have a small working web app. Then modify the code, hit refresh in the browser, et voilà, you see your changes. It’s addictive and productive. Right away I was creating mini tools for myself. If anything, Grails can be used to throw together a prototype. Odds are you will have so much fun doing this, and have it done so quickly, you won’t see much reason to continue with Grails. And if someone objects, why just make sure the requirements require a .war file! The same goes for Groovy – why groovy-all-1.0.jar is just a library dependency is it not? I am joking (well, mostly), but it does illustrate that both of these technologies are made for the Java Platform.

Thanks Ed Povazan. Interested in more? Read Ed’s latest blog posting titled “Grails – Just Use It Already” currently the #1 post on GroovyBlogs’ Most Popular.

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