In my article on InfoQ I've looked into how Grails and Flex can be combined to create a rapid application development platform. I think this is one of the most promising combinations for RIA development at the moment. The Flex space is very happening and there are many initiatives going on. A few days ago I encountered this one on the web: http://www.spicefactory.org/. Apart from the funny name, I think it is a very interesting initiative, because it brings some new concepts to the Flex remoting mix.

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Tags: cinnamon, EntityManager, Flex, flex integration, flex remoting, Grails, Hibernate, JPA, parsley, pimento, spicefactory
Filed under Flex, Grails | 6 Comments »

A short while ago, a collegue and I decided to write an application with Grails and Eclipse RCP. We choose Grails for the ease of development, and Eclipse RCP (in favor of Flex and Plain Old HTML) because we wanted to give our users a solid and native look and feel, for which Eclipse RCP works really well.

Since the Eclipse RCP front-end would actually be a remote front-end, we needed some kind of kind of communication between the client and the server. One of our first idea's was to use XML-RPC, which is pretty well supported in Grails, but it would force us to to do some mapping between our domain and the XML. Since we wanted to use the same domain classes is Eclipse as in Grails (by exporting the Grails domain to external domain jars), we opted for a different approach: Burlap/Hessian.

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Tags: burlap, Grails, Groovy, hessian, httpinvoker
Filed under Grails, Groovy, Java | 7 Comments »

Grails syntax highlighter plugin

Yesterday, I released my first plugin for Grails. The goal of the plugin is to do Syntax Highlighting for Code Snippets in HTML pages, for which no plugin existed yet. The plugin supports a whole range of languages, and even includes Groovy Highlighting support. The Grails Synax Highlighter builds on the great work of Alex Gorbatchev, who wrote and maintains the Javascript Syntax Highlighter.
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Tags: Grails, syntax highlighter
Filed under Grails, Usability | 3 Comments »

Currenttly, I'm in the process of building a Grails application. While I've built several prototypes/quick hacks, this is actually the first 'real' application I'm building. "So", I thought, "if this is a real application, I'm in need of some real tests!". When you're in the normal flow of developing a Grails application, everything goes so fast, you almost forget about writing the tests. So I decided to do it a bit differently, and do it just like in Java: do it TDD!
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Tags: Grails, Testing
Filed under Grails, Groovy, Java, Testing | 2 Comments »