Friday, November 6, 2009

The Grails journey begins

After working with ColdFusion and becoming frustrated with some of it's shortcomings, I decided to use a "grown up" language; Java.  It's been quite a few years since I made the leap to Java, and it has been a very interesting journey.  I have had the "pleasure" to work with many different frameworks, tools, and technologies.  With each I began with the same goal: to find an easier way to do X, from looking for an easier way to parse XML (JAXB, XmlBeans, etc.) to something as trivial as sending an email (JavaMail, Spring's emailTemplate, velocity for templating, etc.), I would always think back to just how "easy" it was to do many of these mundane tasks in ColdFusion.

Every time I would run into one of these challenges I would begin an internal debate about whether I should return to CF.  Each time the same objections came up: IDE support was horrible compared to java, ORM support was immature for EE development, and a big one being the cost of obtaining a CF license for my projects.  Yes, there are open source CF engines, but at the time they were immature and I did not feel they were production ready.  Each time I would choose Java, and selected a framework to build against (most recently the full Spring 3.x stack).  With the release of CF9,  ColdFusion now has built in ORM support (it uses hibernate), and decent IDE support (CFBuilder), but the costs remain.  So I still end up choosing java.

The part that is the most challenging to me with Java is the requirement to have knowledge in so many varied technologies to get a "RAD" environment up and running successfully.  As an example i'll use my last project which was based on Spring.  I wanted to build a web application, backed by a database, and deploy it on tomcat.  Seems simple right?  Getting a working configuration took many hours of scouring the internet, reading (very well written) spring docs, books, and fiddling.  Which TransactionManager to use?  Which DataSource implementation?  Should I configure the OpenSessionInView filter?  Many of these questions I have spent years learning the answers to, but the pain to a new developer is enormous, and many times fatal.  While each of these questions are needed to allow for maximum flexibility, they force a required level of knowledge on the end user.  When I look back to my CF days, to connect to the database it was a simple matter to define a datasource, and then use - a much different experience to the user.

Ruby on Rails (RoR) has shown how a framework paired with a dynamic language can offer extreme productivity gains while reducing the knowledge that a developer must possess to be effective.  I feel that if I move to RoR that I would lose many years experience in Java to gain rapid productivity, instead of leveraging a dynamic language based on the JVM.

In the end I chose to take the dive into Grails and Groovy.  This blog will follow my explorations, challenges, missteps, and (hopefully) successes.

Cheers,
Rich

5 comments:

  1. I wish you the best of luck. I have worked with Grails on multiple projects and am currently working with a team of Cold Fusion developers to train them on Grails and deliver a new application. I suggested they all follow your blog and I will offer tips as I can. Best of luck and welcome to the light/dark side.

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  2. Interesting stuff--kept running into the same internal debates myself recently:
    http://bit.ly/LYwgP

    I'm not switching entirely away from CFML, but I'm definitely loving Grails. It's a fantastic additional tool to have in the toolbox. I'll be curious to see how your transition goes!

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  3. @Scott - Thanks! I'd love any hints, tips, or tricks you can pass along!

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  4. Mr. Haki's blog is an excellent source for Groovy tips. http://mrhaki.blogspot.com

    Then of course there is Scott Davis' Mastering Grails on the IBM Developer site: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-grails01158/

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  5. I used ColdFusion maybe 10 years ago.
    I think it was best web framework.
    I did not see anything better than that.
    yes, the price is the problem. agree. ^^

    After ColdFusion, I used ASP.NET 7 years.
    ASP.NET was not elegant,
    but I loved C# language it self.

    4 month ago, I start travling to Java.
    Oh my god, endless frameworks.
    and almost that was NOT productive.
    I think it will be good or bad using Railo (free CF engine) once a day. ^^

    I think Java makes simple things complex.
    So I tried Groovy.
    I love this dynamic versatile language.

    and I tried Grails too.
    hm, but Grails was too heavy for my taste.
    and It's unique building system has many drawbakcs than good, I think.

    I did tiny prototype project with Grails, and there ware two or three deploy problem.
    First deploy takes 12 hours. god.
    one strange problem not solved yet.

    So I dumped Grails,
    built my own ultra small groovy web library.
    I'm satified with my 500 lines groovy code.

    Summary, ColdFusion was my best.
    Groovy is fascinating.
    Grails has some architectural problems to be used in enterprise, I think.

    I'm coding Groovy, recalling CF. ^^

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