Grails
I finally got the chance to write a real world application using grails. I wrote an application that monitors an Active MQ Queue for xml messages and then parses and stores the messages based on their contents. It’s a pretty straight forward application, but I wanted to make use of GORM for persistence. When I started I didn’t even know about the service layer in grails. I was able to implement my application using a few domain objects and a few services. I really enjoyed writing unit tests where I could, and integration tests for everything else. I even learned a few things along the way! Can I call GORM “find” methods on an object instead of the class? How do you disconnect an object from it’s hibernate session in grails? How do you configure grails to resolve dependencies from a password protected repository? How do you manage the configuration of a grails application deployed as a “product”? Where should I store a sample xml file used by a grails unit test? I’m not 100% sure I’m using best practices everywhere, but I ended up with a working application. I’m really impressed with grails! I hope I get the chance to use it more in the future!
It’s kind of funny because my application doesn’t even use a “Controller”.
