dogan kaya berktas » Groovy

Hello RoR

dkberktas — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:19:13 +0000

Ruby on Rails (RoR) is the new framework I have been playing with and so far I should say it is really amazing. It has all these intuitive approaches that you find out by just guessing. I can only compare it with a couple of other technologies like RIFE (ogrence.net) and Grails (remotespots.com). RIFE has some neat features (template mechanism, web continuations, asynchronous mail queue, persistence layer, etc) but since the lead developer Geert Bevin stop actively developing it, it takes its place in the graveyard of dead tech. Then I try something different, Grails, which is a Groovy version of RoR. It is really good especially after Java Enterprise, convention over configuration is an excellent approach! But it is kind of very young, also Grails has this really fast development cycles, in a couple of month, I had to update my applications two times in which I spend hours to overcome plug-in dependencies, deployment issues, etc. ( one more thing, I can not find any other cool projects that uses Grails, even at SF Bay Groovy and Grails Meetup Group , actually I was the only one who is currently using Grails )

Since finding a good starter document is a very important decision, I took my time to select my first RoR source. I went over the following books and decided to use the latter one:

Ruby on Rails For Dummies
Sitepoint Simply Rails 2nd Edition
Beginning Ruby on Rails
The Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book

Although it is called as a tutorial, when you get the pdf dump, the 12 chapter tutorial is approximately 500 pages, which is literally a book.

The language of the book is very clean and most of the time funny. You can easily develop the code when you are reading it. You can also follow a test driven approach if you want, but you don’t have (I didn’t).

I finished the book in 7 days with a daily 4 hours concentrated reading/coding sessions and with lots of Starbucks Misto (thanks Starbucks Besevler crew!).

The final code is at Github, and live demo site at Heroku.

As a pointer for the further steps, the tutorial suggest some pointers but I prefer to go on with my path, which requires ImageMagick and Paperclip, so next post will be about these two.

See you next time!

ps. I really like Heroku. Grails has something similar but to be honest, it is not that magical (as in iPad).

Grails 1.2.2 and Using ImageTools Plugin with a Slight Modification

dkberktas — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:38:02 +0000

The Grails command create-controller and create-domain-class creates the files directly under the grails-app/domain and grails-app/controller, but the version(1.2.) I am using now has a different behaviour. Instead of grails-app/domain it creates grails-app/domain/{my-app-name}/ and grails-app/controller/{my-app-name}/

So I changed all the groovy file locations into a new folder(package) with my application name ( by the way all these are about my latest online usability testing tool Remotespots.com project). But something weird is happened with the ImageTools plugin. Since I move the controller files, ImageTool class is no longer visible to the controller that uses imagetool. Also, there is no way to import ImageTool since it is in default package, to solve this, go to .grails folder in your home folder and locate your projects folder and change the package of ImageTool.groovy as the following screenshot shows.

further information link

Back to basics — A simple beginning to Grails

dkberktas — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:50:15 +0000

I guess I can finally finish my search for a good server side companion (at least for now). A couple years ago RIFE was my only choice but unfortunately, it didn’t work out well as I expected (RIFE is an open source project but partly because of developers like me who uses the framework but doesn’t pay his gratitude by adding sth to it, RIFE for the time being a dead project (at least for me!))

Anyway, for some time I consider turn back to good old J2EE, then wander on the land of some other Java enterprise frameworks (Spring MVC, Wicket, Struts 2, Hibernate etc ) then Google App engine Java with its in progress full stack framework like environment. Then I decide that all the ones mentioned above has steep learning curves and without feeling complely comfortable with them, It is imposible to develop sth quickly.

Then the obvious direction was rails. First give a try to Django, then read some about RoR but both of them somehow scare me out. I need to learn a new language (which Django tutorial specificly warns about looking a good python tutorial before devlde into Django), on the other hand, Grails (my love!) just start the sentence with “don’t worry about the groovy, you can learn it along the way”.

Obviously, Grails is relatively new compared to two other alternative and it has (or used to have) to many bugs for a relaible product.

But trust me, it is easy to just start and kick the first alfa version of sth out is a joy.

–

Ok this post is suppose to be a yet another introduction to Grails tutorial, so…

Steps to Get Started

1. install Grails (there is nothing I can add here — http://www.grails.org/Installation)

2. open command line and create a project with grails create-app Yeap

3. Go to the created directory cd Yeap

4. Type grails run-app

That’s it!

I’m currently using Apache Shiro plugin (previously JSecurity), Gwt plugin, Postgresql, Eclipse for the development, More posts related to these will be here soon (I hope)