I have been working on a personal project to create a movie catalog database for our collection of movies. Yes, there are a handful of both desktop and web-based applications available to do this, though, they all seem to be lacking in one feature or another… and I needed an interesting useful project. This project has been one of my most enjoyable personal development projects; if you have ever seen my project graveyard, you know there have been quite a few that didn’t get very far for one reason or anther, usually time and/or complexity.
I owe my development-bliss on this project to something not usually found on modern software projects (at least in my experience)… simplicity. No, not simplicity of the project goals, but of the tools and the environment. For development I am using my favorite text editor, Notepad++, Cygwin (yes, I am doing this on Windows… I have not yet found a good solid text editor for Linux, perhaps I will have to make peace with vi)… and that’s it unless you want to count Firefox. But, wait… where is the IDE, the pile of plug-ins, and tools? Well, okay… I am also using Grails along with JQuery and JQueryUI. That’s the key… Grails.
With this environment I have been able to focus on building my application, not plumbing and other mundane details. I have an almost instant turn-around on changes to domain and controller classes, as well as a simple yet flexible syntax that allows for less IDE overhead, hence the text editor. Heck, most of my actual coding has been the HTML and JavaScript for the front-end; I have modified a few scaffold controller actions, and added a few of my own, which have all been simple and straightforward. It truly is a pleasant environment to work with.
Groovy itself is quite nice, providing a much more rich syntax while still maintaining total support of Java and Java syntax. One of the features of Grails I have always appreciated is that you always have Java to fall back on if you need a bit more performance, or access to something that cannot be accessed through Groovy itself. The two languages really coexist quite nicely.
I have the core JavaDocs pretty much burned into my memory (:-)), but I wonder how less-seasoned developers would find this setup. Without an IDE you don’t get code completion or the other helpful features that help to boost the productivity of more junior developers. It’s not meant to be a hard-core developer test; I am not into that kind of stuff. I am all about making development easier… and this just feels right for Grails (and Groovy).
Java web application development has gotten too hard somewhere along the way.
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