I startet trying Grails by reading the Quick Start Tutorial. That’s nice to get a very trivial application running, but it was not enoough for me. So I read across the other tutorials, and tried some, but they did not really satisfy me.

So after some search I found one of those nice free e-books from InfoQ, one of my favorite sources for technical news, presentations, interviews, articles and tutorials about Java & Co. They published the book “Getting Started with Grails”, which can be downloaded as e-book for free or purchased as print version. There is also a presentation about the content of the book (one hour).

The book is written in tutorial style or “learning by example” as called by the author. For me it is just the tutorial I was looking for. Great!

Today I started my fourth attempt to build and run a simple Hello World Application in Groovy. I failed using Grails 0.4 and 0.5.something because it just did not work and I did not get any help. Because these were premature version I tried using grails 1.0.rc4, but on my new machine. It failed too. But as I know now, because of configuration and windows permission issues.

Now I was successful! But it is very hard if you try to develop grails, while being no local admin. The problem is not Grails itself, but my lack of windows knowledge. I ended up, with nearly all windows runing as admin, except the browser.

I also stumpled upon different problems. I could solve them together with our friend Google, but I think I needed two hours to get my very simple CRUD application working.

My conclusion up to now: Grails has to be easier to start with.

A week ago I posted about a GroovyIBatisDao. Here I like to tell you about a few details as I announced.

At work we mainly use Java as general purpose language, but we also pay attention to groovy. There are other scripting languages which are more mature and with a much better syntax, but for our purpose - scripting some Java applications and frameworks - it’s best suited. (You may read a nice article from Fowler about that.)

In one case we use IBatis in the persistence layer and startet to write services which use our SqlMapDaos in Groovy. So I thought about an generic DAO for SQL-Maps using groovy. I had implemented a DAO using Spring Aspects before, like in this article about a generic Hibernate DAO. But this requires at least to define an interface for the DAO. But because Groovy it uses dynamic typing, we can even drop that also.

Groovy 1.5 ist out. It’s grooviest thing on earth. Far beyond the Grandfather of Funk himself, if you believe to the rumours and the ‘press’. Wow! It’s sooo groooovy and you really feel groovy if you’re elected to work with it.

I had some looks at groovy again and again since years. In theory it’s cool and I have many ideas where to use it. I developed some really groovy things in the past two weeks and I wanted to report about them here. But I only feel groovy when thinking about groovy. In theory.

Pratically I hate groovy, because I spend to much time on it, trying to run stupid unit tests in eclipse. The Eclipse Groovy plugin is shockingly terrible. At least it does not even compile my Groovy classes. Argh! Renaming a package which is used in a Groovy class crashes the whole IDE. Much wasted time.

Yes, groovy could be groovy, if there were a reasenable tooling we can use. (I have to stick with Eclipse.)

I hope I can report something positive soon.