Harmony in Grails framework

Contributed by uttam on 10 Jun 2013

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Since its introduction in 2006, Grails has truly evolved and come a long way. With some great support from its community folks, many websites have been developed on Grails that are driving a number of businesses all across the globe.

This blog is an effort to articulate how Grails retains its harmony despite numerous changes to a Grails application.

In this plugin support that I have used in my application, although many features have been used, the application still retains its harmony.

With Grails, it is very easy to include a number of features in an application. We will just need to include the plugins in BuildConfig.groovy.

• Imagine writing your email API, it would definitely take a lot of effort. But in a Grails application, this is very simple.

As you can see, the application can perform simple email operations with just the body being set. I have made use of the company domain to get the email address, title and the location correctly with some order value.

• Next, Imagine writing your JDBC connection to MySQL database, connection pool or JNDI mapping etc. Grails make this easy too. We just need to add a statement in BuildConfig.groovy.

Isn’t this cool? By the way, you can also set your credentials in DataSource.groovy or external Configuration.

• Next let us try to get the ZK plugin working. This is a cool plugin with features like letting the user enter data values in a spread sheet on a Web browser and directly saving it to the database. This concept is as simple as writing your excel file, all we need is a worksheet and a book.

You can tidy your ZK spread sheet in different formats. There are many examples provided by ZK. Many events can be tracked from the spread sheet. By the way, did I tell you that ZK just released a new version as I was typing this blog? I love their support.

• Let us then get to the CRON process. This could have ballooned into another huge project. But with Grails, this is just another plugin.

The CRON expression tells the quartz to be executed. The entire documentation can be found at http://grails-plugins.github.io/grails-quartz. In the CRON expression displayed above, the CRON in the code would execute every Monday and Wednesday.

cronExpression: “s m h D M W Y”

| | | | | | `- Year [optional]

| | | | | `- Day of Week, 1-7 or SUN-SAT, ?

| | | | `- Month, 1-12 or JAN-DEC

| | | `- Day of Month, 1-31, ?

| | `- Hour, 0-23

| `- Minute, 0-59

`- Second, 0-59

A  CRON job can be monitored using the grails monitor plugin. You can stop/start/pause the CRON. Feeling excited? There is more.

• Exposing your Web Service

Many of the services in Grails can easily be exposed to the outer world. We used the CXF plugin to expose our services as SOAP.

With the above code, it is very easy to expose a service in a groovy code as a SOAP interface. We used the SOAP UI to test in the development region and then it was left to the other environments to pick it up. In this case, the other environments were coded in PHP and we were ready for them.

So, integration with the external world was just a piece of cake.

Although I was aware of RAPID development, I never realized it would be this rapid!!

All these plugins that I have created and embedded into the Grails application together with the business functionalities peacefully coexist in Grails. Grails has indeed maintained “Harmony” in the application.

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