Monday, February 26, 2007

Grails - The Journey Begins

Grails has a fairly neat and intuitive home page. You can find the most important stuff there like, er, well, documentation. Imagine that! Along with an 'Installation' page, and a 'Quick Start' page, there's also a 'User Guide', 'Tutorials' and 'FAQ'.

There's 'Reference' links as well as the obligatory mailing lists, wiki, issue tracker and SVN pointers.

The content of the main page bares some testimonials including one that says:
"I found Grails and it was like the heavens opening and angels singing "AAAAaaaaawh". - Les Hazlewood

Wow, that's quite a testimonial. So far I haven't heard the angels, but I'll let you all know, the moment I do.

Nevertheless, while listening out for the angels, I followed the instructions from the Installation page and all went according to plan. Installed Grails, set some necessary environment variables and typed 'grails' in expectation of a help screen and guess what happened... it worked! Pleasantly surprised by this, since a lot of open source projects I've tried DON'T work 'out of the box'.

One point to note is that from previous sandbox activity on my part, I already have Groovy installed on my machine, so I wonder if that installation would have still worked if Groovy wasn't installed. *shrug* I'm not going to investigate that further. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. *grin*

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am curious, what are some of the things you really like about the current grails.org site and what would you like to see?

Splab said...

Hi Ben,

Well as I indicated, I like that the page is neat, simple, and intuitive. The documentation links are crucial.

Can't really say there's much that I see missing. Perhaps a 'screenshots' link, showing Grails development in Eclipse with the Grails plug-in (though I use IDEA), perhaps a screenshot of the basic scaffolding as per Jason's book.

One thing that's also not obvious is the plug-in support with Grails, like say, Glen Smith's Groogle plug-in. I haven't quite gotten to that yet, but I'm led to believe there are numerous plug-ins available for Grails, much like the various Gems available to Rails.

Other than that it's a very good site.