Grails, Groovy, & some other stuff

As the name suggests WebDevRadio is a web development podcast. I'm a big fan of this show. It always delivers an interesting perspective, and the discussions often relate to a technology I'm also exploring.

In a recent episode, the host Michael Kimsal interviewed Jason Rudolph about Jason's new book Getting Started with Grails. I've written before about Ruby and Rails and using something like JRuby to leverage Java's stability and scalability in a production environment. Grails (and Groovy) is an interesting alternative to the Rails/Ruby/JRuby I'd been thinking about. Like Ruby, Groovy is an interpreted language but with some constructs that make it easier for Java developers to transition over. Also, since it's written for the JVM, it gets all the Java maturity "for free" and naturally integrates with existing Java modules (No need for something like JRuby).

Grails brings the Rails goodness to the Groovy platform... including a lot of the tools (scaffolding, included persistence layer, etc.) and concepts (convention over configuration) that make it easy to quickly get something up and running in Rails. I'm going to spend some more time checking it out.

This was a great conversation. They also touched on:
  • No Fluff, Just Stuff. These sound like great conferences to learn and explore new and cutting edge ideas and technology
  • Streamlined Framework. This framework adds some productivity enhancements to Rails and ActiveRecord.
  • Solr. As I understand it, Solr adds a web service front-end to Lucene. I had done some previous work with Lucene and this podcast series had introduced me to Solar. Should I ever need to revisit that work, I'm going to keep this project in mind.

Comments

Jason Rudolph said…
Hi Vincent,
I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the podcast. I'd like to offer one small clarification to your post if I may. While Groovy offers the interactivity of an interpreted language, all code is actually compiled prior to execution. The nice part, of course, is that the compilation happens automatically, with no extra effort required on the part of the developer.

All the best,
Jason
October 13, 2007 at 1:39 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Believe...

A recent reorg at my company left me with a new manager - and a different approach to software development than my team had been previously following.  Our new approach is one that I don’t necessarily agree with, but it led me to think about - and reevaluate -  those tenets of software development that I think are important and that I believe lead to increased quality and productivity. This post will consist of fairly high level discussions about how to organize code, teams, and projects - but contain very little actual code. Many of these ideas will not be my own.  They are mostly ideas I’ve learned from others and their willingness to share their experiences with me.  They are, however, ideas that I’ve practiced and hardened as I’ve worked to build my own ideal environment for delivering value through software . Many of these ideas I now take for granted as commonplace (even though they aren’t).  I felt a need to document them anyway - so people can understand what to expect (a
Read more

FRail :include

I really like developing with Rails, but I've been frustrated the last few days by some things Rails should do quite easily, yet doesn't. I've already written here and here about some of my struggles with Rails :include clause. Here's one more... Let's say you have a has-and-belongs-to-many relationship. If you :include this relationship in a find query, Rails will automatically create the join clause including the lookup table! That's cool. Unfortunately, it looks as if only the :include clause provides this piece of functionality. Why isn't the same functionality provided via the :join clause or through a general purpose module? This doesn't make any sense to me! I'm working on a database application where I don't need to display a lot of data, but the data displayed is heavily filtered by it's connections to other information in the database. I need to join a lot of tables to perform the filtering operation and using :include
Read more

Performance Tuning JCAPS - Part 2

It's been close to 2 months since my first Performance Tuning JCAPS post. Since then, we've noticed our servers running out of TCP connections under heavy load. Researching this problem, we learned that the JCAPS' JMS server makes heavy use of TCP in implementing Request/Reply queues . We approached Sun for guidance and they assured us that they've had success implementing high throughput applications using the JMS request reply solution... but how? It appears a multi-step solution is needed. First, running out of TCP connections in a scenario like ours is a JCAPS bug addressed in an ESR (110348) and rolled into JCAPS 5.1.3 Update Release 3 . We installed this update and noticed a marked improvement. Running my simple 75 user simulated test, transactions took 2521 ms to round trip (compared to the previous time of 20128ms). While this is great improvement, an average of 2.5 seconds is still really slow for this simple transaction. We reported our findings to Su
Read more