Grails

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Grails is a next-generation web development framework powered by Groovy and Java technologies.

Dependencies

  • Grails use the embeddable Groovy jar. You will run into problems if you use the standalone Groovy jar.
  • Grails use currently as of 0.5.0 a custom build of a Spring-modules snapshot. You must thus use the .jar provided in Grails distribution.
  • Grails use version 2.1 of commons-lang.
  • Grails use Sitemesh 2.3
  • Grails use Quartz 1.6.0

Deployment and build system

  • Under the hood, Grails uses Gant as its build system. Gant is based on Ant but allows you to write build files with Groovy code: you are no longer restrained to XML programming!
  • If you write your own Gant scripts (in $PROJECT_HOME/scripts), you can apparently completely customize the build process.
  • Note that when running the embedded Jetty server (or when running any Grails script for that matter), the additional JAR dependencies are loaded in the classpath.

The web-app directory

While this directory mostly seems to be recreated by the Grails build script, there seem to be such files that are needed there:

  • WEB-INF/web.template.xml
  • WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml

Questions

  • Does scaffolding works on deployed environment or only on the test container?