Groovy - Grails Work

Onto new stuff...I have been working a lot with Grails lately. This is the technology that I have chosen to use for the implementation of the gathereventplanning.com website. While Grails is easy to use out of the box, I have found myself searching the net for information regarding customization. No doubt about it, unless you are creating your own simple CRUD application, you will want to customize the program in one way or another.

There have been many articles and blogs written about creating Grails applications and customizing them, but perhaps one of the best I have found so far is the Mastering Grails series...it has been quite helpful thus far.

I'm not going to get too technical in this brief post, but I will say that I have found a bug already. The issue resides in the Grails 1.0.2 release. I had created and customized a tiny CRUD application for testing purposes using the embedded database that comes with Grails. All was good until I attempted to "hook" my program to a PostgreSQL database instead. At that point the application was in read-only mode as it was unable to perform any batch inserts or updates to the database. Each time I tried to insert or update data, I received a stack trace stating that there was a SQL Grammar error.

I scratched my head for days on this one, looked at lots of hibernate documenation (since this is used behind the scenes in Grails), and even tried to change my domain model a bit to see if that would work. Eventually, I ended up downloading Grails 1.0.1 and trying to do the same thing. It works perfectly...no issues as yet. I have been able to successfully re-create my small application and use a PostgreSQL database without issues.

My guess is that this will be resolved with Grails 1.0.3 release, but we will see. So far, I love Grails as it is quite powerful and easy to use. Other than the bug I found, the only complaint I have is that Grails is so involved...many plug-ins are available and the Grails documentation is huge as it is. If you really want to become an expert Grails developer, you will be doing a lot of studying...but learning new technology like this is fun stuff.