Grails Application Development Notes

I started a grails application for Sun using the latest version of groovy (1.5) and grails (1.0-RC3). Things went fairly smooth but I was glad to be under 'git' control to rollback branches as the project developed. My first problem with with mixed case characters in domain and controllers...

I originally created an IBBUser domain model. Ok, I should probably re-name it IbbUser but old habits die hard. Anyway, the model generation went fine, but when I went to create the controller using generate-all, that's when things fell apart.

I'm not sure why (yet) but 'generate-all' created my views in an IBBUser folder. This was a problem when I ran the app, so I scrapped the project and re-generated with the domain name of 'user'. I probably could have used 'ibbuser' in lower case, but oh well...

Working with generated code in grails or rails can get out of hand quickly--so many files and folders to track. So I set up branches--one for domains, the other for controllers. Before generating code, I quickly go to the appropriate branch, generate and test the code, do multiple commits then merge it to the master branch when I'm sure things are working as they should. If not, it's easy to revert or even delete the entire branch and start over.

Database Configuration: Out of the box grails configures the application for hypersonic. To configure MySQL requires three steps: 1) create the development, test, and production databases and login permissions, 2) modify the conf/DataSource.groovy configuration, and 3) drop the MySQL connector/j jar into the project's lib folder. When this is complete simply do a 'grails run-app' and you will see the new tables appear in the database.

The project at this point has only a single domain class, User so a single table is created called 'user'. All columns were created including an 'id' and 'version' column. Without any constraints, all columns default to 'not null'.

I prefer the rails convention of plurals and lock_version, but I'll leave that for now.

Constraints: Adding constraints was very straight forward. I watched the server restart and the database re-build with each change. Lots of magic going on in the background. I tested the constraints through the UI. The next step is to create unit and integration tests. More on that in a later post...