theJavaJar.com

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
email: admin@admin.com
password: admin

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.

I attended the 2008 2GX software symposium in Reston, VA and I have definitely decided to use Groovy/Grails to develop Tangerine. I have been tossing and turning over the decision that I made a few months back to use Groovy/Grails, but now I really have some confidence in my decision. I have to re-factor my current code base a bit, but that should only take a month. I had originally intended to have Tangerine’s Product Manager out by the end of February but it looks like it will be in Beta by the end of March or mid April, with Sales Manager and Account Manager soon to follow.