techno.blog("Dion")

It was bound to happen. The Groovy folk have seen the boon from Ruby on Rails, and want to get in on some of that action :)

A discussion of Grails (Groovy on Rails) sparked up on the mailing list, and miracles happen… code has come out of it.

Steven Devijver put together the first 0.0001 release of this code:

A first version of Grails is available in CVS. It’s located under groovy/modules/grails. Currently simple controllers are implemented together with JSP support. The MVC part is based on Spring MVC.

Build the project via “ant jar”

To start your own project with Grails set the GRAILS_HOME environment variable. Next create a directory for your project and from within this directory run this command:

ant -f ${GRAILS_HOME}/src/grails/build.xml -Dbasedir=`pwd` init

to initialize the project directory structure.

Place your controllers under the grails-app directory and your JSP’s under the jsp directory. A simple controller in Grails looks like
this:

class NamesController {
@Property String namesView = “names”
@Property Closure names = {
request, response ->

return [ "names" : [ "John", "Jill", "Jack", "Jaqueline" ] ]
}
}

Then make sure to create a view.

To create a WAR for deployment run this command:

ant -f ${GRAILS_HOME}/src/grails/build.xml -Dbasedir=`pwd` war

This will create a war names grails-app.war.

When the WAR is deployed access it through this URI:

/grails-app/app/names

Obviously, this is insanely early days. It is so interesting to see how people are revisiting their way of dealing with web applications after Rails.

NewsGator updated their Outlook Edition. One of the many changes, is that now your email client view of your feeds sync’s up with the web view. This is good, as you get your feeds with you simply in your email client (especially offline), yet if you are on another computer somewhere (say, at a conference), you can simply check-in to your normal world.

One of the problems is that now if you rename a folder in Outlook, NewsGator is sending data back to the service to tell it to change its metadata on that entry. This hangs outlook. The user is never told that a simple rename, which we are trained to think of as a simple local operation, is an expensive one.

Feedback in the UI is good.

The iPod’s from Apple keep getting smaller and smaller. Apple just announced the smallest yet with the iPod Flea.

To be honest, I don’t get the Shuffle at all. Maybe it fits some peoples usage, but for me I much prefer having more than a couple of songs, and the mini is hardly large!

We will see what really happens with the iPod Mobile.