In my quest to deliver an application to my fictional customer I’m having to learn a number of things before I can get started. The idea was predicated on the notion that an enterprise quality application could be delivered very quickly and economically given the right combination of tools and technologies.
I chose Groovy and Grails as the web application framework so I had to get busy and learn enough to accomplish my task. It has taken me longer than most to get up to speed on these tools but given my background that seems reasonable. Having spent the last eight years in senior management and the four years before that in project management my coding skills are a little rusty to say the least.
I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to pick up both Groovy and Grails. If you know Java then Groovy is pretty simple, the hardest part is simply getting used to the language. I spent a lot of time actually writing Java code then refactoring it into Groovy. It reminded me of the first time I wrote something in C++, the first few iterations were C code that I eventually refactored into true C++. If you believe that when it comes to software that “less is more” the Groovy is for you.
Being comfortable with Groovy I then tackled Grails. If you are comfortable with frameworks like Rails and others then there will be few surprises with Grails. It only took me a day or so to get up to speed enough with Grails to be able to accomplish something with it. Grails emphasizes convention over configuration and that, at least for me, took some getting used to. I’m one of those folks who likes to control every aspect of the environment so it was a change for me to let convention rule. Once you get used to it, however, it works well. I try hard to stay out of the way and let Grails do what it does and when I’m successful things seem to work out reasonably well.
I decided to use a Javascript library for the user interface mostly because this too was new to me. I think the last time I used Javascript was about 1996 and I actually remember using Livescript so I figured I was in for a long learning curve here. I was pleasantly surprised again though, it turned out to be quite straightforward. I confess, I find Javascript a bit strange but I attribute that to my having focused on the server side of things for so long and not fussing about the client. I suppose Javascript folks would find J2EE artifacts like EJB, JSP, JSF and Servlets a bit different at first glance as well.
The good news is that after having given myself a week to learn the basics of all the technologies I’m quite comfortable tackling my Yard Management exercise so stay tuned.
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