GroovyZone has an interview with Glen Smith, an early adopter and active contributor to Grails. I have excerpted five questions and answers that were of a high level nature.
Q. You are an early adopter of Grails, how do you see it now that it has achieved 1.0 status ?
A. I remember writing an email to Graeme [Rocher - Grails project lead] sometime around Grails 0.2 saying “Do you realise what you’ve done!?! You have just changed the whole game of Java webapps!”. Grails is no doubt going to be one of those disruptive technologies that forever changes how we build Java web apps going forward. The framework was awesome *then*, and a year and a half later we have something incredibly powerful.
Someone asked me the other day “But hasn’t Grails just gone 1.0, isn’t it immature?”. I can only say that it’s the most feature-filled 1.0 that I’ve ever seen! I shipped my first apps on 0.2 HEAD, and Grails could probably have gone 1.0 at the 0.3 stage. There was certainly pressure for that at the time, but the team was adamant that they would ship it when it was feature complete, and not be hassled into 1.0. It’s a testament to their stickability that they kept to that vision. It was worth the wait.
Q. Do you have a preferred set of Grails plugins ?
A. If I was marooned on a desert island, what Grails plugins would I take with me?
RichUI would be in there for sure. The set of UI plugins in there are just very slick, and I’m a big believer that slick matters. People don’t buy the steak, they buy the sizzle. All that.
I also love Searchable - that thing is just awesome. Those two are my favorite general purpose, meat-and-potatoes plugins. Both have great docs, and I’ve had good success with both getting things out the door quickly.
In the “more niche” plugin space, the GoogleCharts plugin just rocks. I use that for Stats charting in Gravl. In the “next plugin I’m trying out” list, I really like the look of the DBUnit plugin, that’s definitely on my list as I ramp up my testing kungfoo.
Q. What would you like to see in a future version of Grails ?
A. I think the whole plugin space is still evolving and has lots of cool things ahead. Dependency resolution around plugins would be nice. It would be nice to be able to declare that my project “depends” on RichUI, and not have to checkin RichUI code into my plugins folder - just let Grails download it and install it. Would make distributing projects a little easier.
I think that unit testing support is still in the early days. I’ve just finished a series discussing unit testing on my blog, and the framework support for it is still a little scratchy. I know the guys are working on stuff there (including integrated CI servers), and there’s JIRAs in about mocking support, so that will no doubt be there soon.
It’s hard to think of anything else. The Grails project velocity is so high, the quickest way to get stuff done is to just a raise a JIRA. Everything I’ve asked for has always turned up in a dot release with a month or two!
One thing I would like to see is more Groovy/Grails “community” sites built using Grails. The Ruby and Rails guys have really done great work building community sites, and I think it’s the next logical step for us in growing the platform. Get busy people!
Q. What would you like to see in a future version of Groovy ?
A. Anonymous Inner classes! Particularly when interacting with Java libraries I find the lack of Inner classes frustrating. There’s always workarounds, but it would be nice to able to do it as I do it in Java - much easier on the mental model.
I’d also like to see parentheses optional when invoking methods with no arguments. It would make writing DSLs a lot more expressive if we could totally get rid of those pesky parentheses. Again there are workarounds, but having this “just work” would be very cool (it’s probably a ton of grammar work, but it would still be nice 
Q. Do you have some tips for people starting with Grails ?
A. The absolute best way to learn Grails is on the job. Download the distro, do the quickstart from the manual, and start on that pet project you’ve been putting off for years. Let you Groovy and Grails kungfu increase while you’re working on a real project, rather than trying to learn a thousand things before you start. It’s so addictive you’ll be motivated to learn more as your project powers on.
Once you’re underway and ready to learn more about Groovy, grab a copy of Groovy In Action to really understand some of the finer points of Groovy. It will also help you get more idiomatic in your Groovy approach to things. On the Grails side, grab a copy of Graeme’s Definitive Guide to Grails (the 2nd edition is due mid year, and will be worth the wait). It’s a great book for learning Grails.
Tags: Groovy Grails
Awesome Chris! Let me know if you want to release it into the Grails central repo at plugins.grails.org
About
April 15th, 2008 at 1:27 pm In June 2007 I wrote as a comment to someones blog post:
“I believe the Java stack started with Apache incubating alot of projects and incorporating even more (like lucene). JBoss followed by buying open source developers (Hibernate, the King) and Spring almost started as a stack.
Obviously in the last years all stack providers aimed to complete their stack and reduce the risk that their users would switch to another stack or incorporate technologies from another stack.
Beside Apache I think you forget the Grails stack. From my feeling it’s much faster growing then the JRoR stack.”
One year later I still believe this is the way things flow in open source Java land.
Peace
-stephan