Grails

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 (in Portage).

• Grails use Sitemesh 2.3

• Grails use Quartz 1.6.0

• Grails use ehcache 1.2.4 (in Portage).

• Grails use cglib 2.1.3 (in Portage).

• Grails use commons-beanutils 1.7 (in Portage) with the additional Bean Collections API (currently not built in Portage!!!).

• Grails use Hibernate 3.2 (not in Portage). Version 3.1 is NOT good enough.

• Grails use the JSTL (specification 1.1). In Portage, the Jakarta implementation is available.

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.

• It seems that all the jar dependencies must be present in common/lib. Tomcat has problems when some are in shared/lib.

The web-app directory

Part of this directory is 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
• WEB-INF/sitemesh.xml

Without these files the web application won't start !!

In addition, the css, js, and images folders there are not populated by the default build scripts.

Questions

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