Grails Dataset Loaders, Part 2

About a month ago I posted a few thoughts on Dataset Loaders for Grails. Now that one of my Grails projects is going into beta, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the issue.

Rails History: With rails I used fixtures for test data and had to hand code data loaders for production. I put the loaders in lib/tasks. They were rake tasks that did the initial loading and/or refreshing of data for a specified environment. So data loading for a production or development was a manual task. Not a huge burden, but just one more thing to remember.

Now that I'm in the Grails realm I have created automatic loaders that are environment aware. A DatasetBootStrap class loads data for development, test, and production whenever the server starts. This is in line with what hibernate does when it starts up--verify that the domain models match the current data source, and make changes where necessary. In rails this is done with migrations--a good idea, but yet another manual step.

DatasetBootStrap: The DatasetBootStrap class first determines the current environment, then loads the appropriate dataset classes and invokes the "load" method (or closure if you will). A list of datasets is configured manually for each environment. This approach makes it possible to share loaders for all three environments (or four if you use staging). Some data is just for test. Other data, like a list of US States, is loaded for all three environments. The main point is nothing is repeated, keeping my code as DRY as possible.

Datasets: I currently keep my datasets in src/groovy/datasets, but I think that it's time to move this folder into grails-app/conf/datasets. I also use a package declaration (package datasets) to insure that dataset classes don't conflict with other classes (I've had problems with this in the test structure when trying to create unit tests that have a name conflict with integration tests).

Simulating Rails-Like Test Fixtures: This was the easy part. In each test that requires a specific dataset, the setUp() method is used to load as many datasets as necessary to create a solid test environment. Loading all the data is as easy as calling the DatasetBootStrap's init() method.

Grails Integration: My goal for Datasets is to propose it's use for all grails projects by integrating it into the grails core. I have a bit of refactoring to do before this is practical, but would welcome any comments or suggestions from other grails (or rails) users as to what features a Dataset loader module should include.

10 Reasons to Switch from Rails to Grails

After spending a few years really enjoying Rails it was difficult to bring myself to even try groovy and grails. But my latest contract forced me to look for alternatives, and I'm glad I did. Here are some reasons that you may want to switch...

1. GORM with hibernate/spring and jpa is much better than ActiveRecord
2. No distribution problems; runs in many production ready containers
3. Internationalization out of the box (not specifically ignored as DHH does)
4. Transactions actually work, and they include save-points.
   
5. Not only dynamic finders and counters, but dynamic listOrderBy
   
6. No green threads (although this may be fixed in Ruby 2.0, around 2010?)
   
7. Ability to use pessimistic locking out of the box
   
8. Real-live prepared statements and .withCriteria method
9. Production level test reporting with built in Mocking and Stubbing
10. Search operations are based on Lucene (with a plugin)

All of these don't make sense for a non-java coder. And my startup time for grails would have be much longer without my prior experience with Rails and Ruby.

One thing I thought I might be giving up was the endless list of valuable gems that make developing in Rails a real pleasure. But after re-reviewing the list of open source products from apache, java source, spring, hibernate, and even Sun (glassfish), I can't think of any gems that I will miss.