thejavajar

I recently signed up with a Java hosting provider. I needed to put something together to prove to myself and clients that Grails would be a viable solution to create some quick custom applications. I have seen Groovy and Grails do some great things and I have written a few applications to test the technology, but I have mostly run the applications in hosted mode.

I thought that a good test would be to create a simple account/address/contact management application because that is a pretty common business application. I just kept it in line with what I have seen out there and I was guided by some requirements in my head. It is really simple, but it is definitely prettier, more intuitive, and easier to maintain than a lot of code I have seen that has taken 10x longer to build.

I spent about 8-10 hours putting it together and running it through some tests. I spent another 1-2 hours getting it deployed on my JBoss 4 server with a MySQL JNDI datasource configured and managed within JBoss. I don’t think the application will change the world, but it just confirms my belief that Grails is an incredible technology/tool set that keeps you focused on solving business problems rather than fighting technology.

url: http://www.axiomaticit.com/accountManager
http://code.google.com/p/grails-poc/

email: admin@admin.com
password: admin
note: Email me and I will setup you up with access.

Well I decided to post a screen shot of Tangerine’s Product Manager. I am still working on the Flex front-end but most of my Grails back-end is in place for now. I think Flex is a great technology for creating Rich UI’s with little effort. I have been working with Flex for a few months now and I think that it will definitely be something that development shops will have to consider when moving forward with a new project.

The Grails back-end is probably less complex(to me the developer) than the Flex front-end. When you have the power of Spring and Hibernate with little effort that is a great thing. When you can leverage those technologies with a Flex front-end, you get the best of both worlds.

So, I am still working on Tangerine. Some of my colleagues have seen some simple demos of what I have done with the Flex/Grails application that I have been working on for a little while now, but it is not ready for public consumption. I am really trying to wrap things up on the first Beta release of Product Manager so I can work on the Account Manager and Sales Manager and get those releases out before summer.

There are a couple of things that I have been fighting with:

First, time. I should be working on some software that helps me create time. Finding time to work on my projects is one of the things that I have been battling each week.

Second, Flex. Flex is great, but I am not a Flex developer, so I guess I really need to break down and buy Flex Builder 3. I am not trying to do anything too crazy, but I think having FB 3 on my side will at least aid me in my quest to build nice RIA Web applications. I have been using TextMate for everything so far. I have 90% of the UI done, but the last 10% is where I need to bring out the big guns.

Everything on the Grails side is going great. There are a few things I need to tweak, but I am still extremely excited about working with Grails. Speaking of working with Grails…I did a search on Dice and found 10 posts for jobs in the US. That number will get bigger, people just need time.

I currently have taken down SWCM with the move to my new ISP hosting environment, but I will be re-factoring it for a client in the near future and should have a demo up sometime in April or May.