Nick Carroll

Last night at the Groovy Group we had Graeme Roche from SpringSource and lead developer of Grails give a webinar titled “Building Twitter with Grails in 40 minutes“. We were all impressed, not only with how Grails leverages Spring and third party plugins but also with the Twitter application that Graeme was building. He gave a new meaning to TDD — Twitter Driven Development. Each new feature that he added allowed him to tweet about it in the application that he was building. It was evident that he enjoys talking about Grails and connecting with user groups, even the flu wasn’t going to keep him away from giving the talk!

I am amazed with how many quality presenters we have had at the Sydney Groovy Group, and the number of project leads that have presented on their Groovy projects.

At the last meeting we got to hear about Griffon from James Williams, one of the project’s lead developers. Griffon is a Grails like framework for developing Swing based desktop applications. I was extremely impressed with Griffon, and how easy it was to create components without having to implement a bunch of event listeners or interfaces that you don’t need or care about. It was also interesting to see how the MVC pattern was applied to a Swing application. It made me wish Griffon was around 10 years ago when I was building Swing applications for Xylogy.

The May Sydney Groovy group will be meeting this Wednesday. Graeme Rocher will be giving a webinar on Grails, plus a run down on the recent GR8 Conference. So you’ll get to hear first hand on where Spring intends to take Groovy and Grails.

If you intend to make it to the meeting then please express your interest in the forums.

By default if you create a Grails application called funkysite (i.e. you did grails create-app funkysite on the command line), then when you run your application the root context is set to /funkysite. This means that your controllers such as a UserController with a show action will be available at http://localhost:8080/funkysite/user/show. Having “funkysite” as the root context is redundant, especially if you want to host your application at http://funkysite.com/funkysite/user/show.

My preference is to just have “/” as the root application context. Fortunately, you can easily configure the root application context in Grails. All you need to do is edit conf/Config.groovy and add grails.app.context = “/”. This will set your root application context to “/”, so that the above UserController and show action will be available at http://localhost:8080/user/show.