Large commercial Grails site goes live

Sky (commercially known as BSkyB), who are the biggest satellite broadcaster in the UK and largely owned by News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch et al), have re-launched their Sky showbiz news portal, powered by Grails.

The site was put together by energizedwork, a consulting firm in the UK, well done guys!

This represents one of the largest, commercial public facing Grails applications (that we at G2One Inc are able to talk about at least ;-) out there at the moment with traffic in the region of 186 million page views a month. Its great to see so many huge companies taking the leap to Grails, long may it continue!

Grails at JavaOne & CommunityOne 08

This year, along with Guillaume, I will be presenting 2 talks at JavaOne 08 on Groovy and Grails:

• TS-5764 - Grails in Depth
• TS-5793 - Groovy and Grails: Changing the
  Landscape of Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE Platform)
  Patterns

As well as a single talk at Monday's CommunityOne 08 event:

• S297193 - Grails: Productive Web Development with Groovy, Spring, and Hibernate

See you there!

Using Groovy & BeanBuilder for Spring + Hibernate Integration Testing

Checkout my new Groovy Zone article Using Groovy & BeanBuilder for Spring + Hibernate Integration Testing

Groovy is Java AND Groovy is not Java

There is a new dynamic language shootout featured on InfoQ where Groovy comes out on top as the JVM language of choice for a variety of reasons and one of the reasons cited was that it is a near superset of Java. Queue the comments from the Ola Bini brigade that:

"If you're going to use Groovy the same way you use Java, there is absolutely no gain. Just a performance hit."

However, this sadly is missing the point. Sure, if you write Groovy like Java you get no real benefit, but it provides that migration and, crucially, learning path onto a Groovier way.

Learning a programming language is for the most part trivial and can be achieved in a few days. Learning the libraries is what takes the time. Groovy shares the same Java APIs as standard Java, you know things that you know and love like java.io.File, java.lang.String etc.?

The real difference comes in what it adds to these standard libraries through the GDK. For example great stuff like this:

myFile.eachLine { println it }

def contents = new URL("http://google.com").text

def list = ['a','c','b']
list = list.collect { it.toUpperCase() }.sort()

def text = "Hello World"
text = text - "World"
println text // prints "Hello "
println text[0..-3] // prints "Hell"

Once you learn the "new way" combined with meta-programming capabilities that Groovy has on offer you'll never look back.

Scott Davis came up with a great quote to describe this at the recent 2GX: Groovy/Grails Experience:

"Groovy is Java AND Groovy is not Java at the same time"

In other words, you get the best of both worlds.

The Grails Podcast Returns

Sven is back with his Grails podcast, now a fortnightly event, and even better Glen Smith, the brilliant ozzie behind Gravl and Groovyblogs (2 great Grails sample applications), has joined him!

Check it out.

Using Grails with Atlassian Crowd

The Atlassian guys (creators of JIRA, Confluence etc.) are using Grails for some of their projects and have written a nice article on how to setup Grails, with the Acegi plugin, and Atlassian's single sign-on (SSO) solution Crowd. Nice work.