Thought's about software, Grails, Java, web development and anything else that comes to mind.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Grails Interview on Groovy.org.es
The nice chaps at Groovy.org.es were kind enough to take the time to interview me. For those who want to improve their Spanish and learn what's going on in the Groovy/Grails world check it out.
Here is a translation to English by Google Translate service: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgroovy.org.es%2Fhome%2Fstory%2F14&langpair=es%7Cen&hl=en&safe=active&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
Hi Graeme, thanks again for being so kind with us!
here is the original english version: * Could you please introduce yourself, tell us who you are and what are your main projects at present?
Hi, my name is Graeme Rocher. I am project lead on Grails, a committer on the Groovy project and CTO at Skills Matter (http://www.skillsmatter.com)
* What is Grails and what does it have to contribute to the Java web frameworks available today?
Grails is a web application framework that embraces convention-over-configuration and DRY. It is based on the Groovy language, and is designed to re-use existing Java frameworks and specifications such as Spring, Hibernate and JEE.
* Why should we want dynamic languages in a Java project? What do they provide us that we hadn't before?
The barrier of entry for modern Java development is too high. Dynamic languages allow ease of use and expressiveness that is just not possible in Java. Groovy makes the common tasks faced by Java developers simple. Text processing is a breeze thanks to support for things like regular expressions, multi-line strings and string interpolation at the language level. You can expect to see a dramatic reduction in your line of code (LOC) count and less lines of code results in less bugs!
* How stable is Grails today? Is 0.4.2 production-ready?
It is being used in production sites now and is built on such production ready frameworks like Spring & Hibernate. The main areas for improvement with Grails now are the developer experience.
* What are the main goals for 0.5? and for 1.0?
The main goals are to continue to improve the developer experience. To help this we're implementing a technical internal DSL for defining URL mappings, improving unit testing support, and improving the capability of the GORM persistence framework for 0.5.
Moving forward in 1.0 we hope to provide JSP tag library support in GSP, improve Javascript and Ajax support and finally generally just fix all the niggling development experience issues our users are experiencing. Hopefully we can achieve this all by Autumn.
* What are the main technical decisions that have been made in the process of developing Grails?
Well obviously it was important to base Grails on sound technologies such as Spring, Hibernate and SiteMesh. However, a crucial part of Grails is the plugin system and from the start we decided to embrace extensibility and allow users to provide their own plugins that can extend Grails' existing capabilities.
* How does Grails play in the corporate world? Do you have any data about its adoption in profesional projects?
There appears to be a lot going on with Grails in the enterprise world. Only recently gave a talk at Sun tech days to an audience who were primarily from the banking and insurance industries. I also heard about a French company who implemented a system to manage television broadcasts to different French islands in Grails so adoption is definitely on the rise. It makes complete sense of course, because Grails is so much simpler for those who already have Java/Spring/Hibernate systems.
* What's the current level of support for Grails in IDE's like Netbeans or Eclipse, and what is the direction being developed?
All I can say is that it is improving. I think this is largely thanks to the release of Groovy 1.0, but there is definitely a lot of movement from the Eclipse plug-in guys. Also, Sun appear to be looking at supporting Groovy & Grails is NetBeans so that is fantastic news. Finally, I believe there is also movement to improve support for Groovy in IntelliJ IDEA.
* How many people are working actively in Grails development at these days?
We have 7 committers in total.
* And the last one: Is there anything else you'd like to say?
Just thank you for taking the time to interview me and given that I have a Spanish wife and spend a lot of time over their I truely hope Grails is successful in Spain!
Here is a translation to English by Google Translate service: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgroovy.org.es%2Fhome%2Fstory%2F14&langpair=es%7Cen&hl=en&safe=active&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
ReplyDeleteEnjoy!
Hi Graeme, thanks again for being so kind with us!
ReplyDeletehere is the original english version:
* Could you please introduce yourself, tell us who you are and what are
your main projects at present?
Hi, my name is Graeme Rocher. I am project lead on Grails, a committer
on the Groovy project and CTO at Skills Matter
(http://www.skillsmatter.com)
* What is Grails and what does it have to contribute to the Java web
frameworks available today?
Grails is a web application framework that embraces
convention-over-configuration and DRY. It is based on the Groovy
language, and is designed to re-use existing Java frameworks and
specifications such as Spring, Hibernate and JEE.
* Why should we want dynamic languages in a Java project? What do they
provide us that we hadn't before?
The barrier of entry for modern Java development is too high. Dynamic
languages allow ease of use and expressiveness that is just not
possible in Java. Groovy makes the common tasks faced by Java
developers simple. Text processing is a breeze thanks to support for
things like regular expressions, multi-line strings and string
interpolation at the language level. You can expect to see a dramatic
reduction in your line of code (LOC) count and less lines of code
results in less bugs!
* How stable is Grails today? Is 0.4.2 production-ready?
It is being used in production sites now and is built on such
production ready frameworks like Spring & Hibernate. The main areas
for improvement with Grails now are the developer experience.
* What are the main goals for 0.5? and for 1.0?
The main goals are to continue to improve the developer experience. To
help this we're implementing a technical internal DSL for defining URL
mappings, improving unit testing support, and improving the capability
of the GORM persistence framework for 0.5.
Moving forward in 1.0 we hope to provide JSP tag library support in
GSP, improve Javascript and Ajax support and finally generally just
fix all the niggling development experience issues our users are
experiencing. Hopefully we can achieve this all by Autumn.
* What are the main technical decisions that have been made in the process
of developing Grails?
Well obviously it was important to base Grails on sound technologies
such as Spring, Hibernate and SiteMesh. However, a crucial part of
Grails is the plugin system and from the start we decided to embrace
extensibility and allow users to provide their own plugins that can
extend Grails' existing capabilities.
* How does Grails play in the corporate world? Do you have any data about
its adoption in profesional projects?
There appears to be a lot going on with Grails in the enterprise
world. Only recently gave a talk at Sun tech days to an audience who
were primarily from the banking and insurance industries. I also heard
about a French company who implemented a system to manage television
broadcasts to different French islands in Grails so adoption is
definitely on the rise. It makes complete sense of course, because
Grails is so much simpler for those who already have
Java/Spring/Hibernate systems.
* What's the current level of support for Grails in IDE's like Netbeans or
Eclipse, and what is the direction being developed?
All I can say is that it is improving. I think this is largely thanks
to the release of Groovy 1.0, but there is definitely a lot of
movement from the Eclipse plug-in guys. Also, Sun appear to be looking
at supporting Groovy & Grails is NetBeans so that is fantastic news.
Finally, I believe there is also movement to improve support for
Groovy in IntelliJ IDEA.
* How many people are working actively in Grails development at these
days?
We have 7 committers in total.
* And the last one: Is there anything else you'd like to say?
Just thank you for taking the time to interview me and given that I
have a Spanish wife and spend a lot of time over their I truely hope
Grails is successful in Spain!