Pragmatic Geek

I started my first Grails project today, using the basic project in NetBeans.  I was going to start with vanilla Groovy, but learning thick client Java seemed like more work than going whole hog into Grails.

I’ve said for some time, I’m scared to try Groovy/Grails, since I’ll probably get angry at all the time spent doing plumbing work rather than real code.  I’m on track for that to be true.  Some of the things it does by default are just scary – the scaffold pages for list/view/edit are pretty.  

The prototype I’m working on goes beyond a basic CRUD app, but I could see how this framework closes a RAD gap for the java world.

Google has been my friend – almost any question I come up with has been answered in a blog post or email message.  I haven’t acquired a book yet, although I probably should.  A series of articles at IBM developerWorks has also been a good start

Some vagaries I’m stumbling on

• When does hot deploy work or not?  Some changes are immediately viewable (and my Bootstrap method has been refreshed), and others require restarting the app.
• Why doesn’t code completion work in BootStrap.groovy  (Netbeans 6.5)