Monday 22 June 2009

Grails gotchas / showstoppers effecting uptake

I was somewhat relieved when I came across this blog post which highlights the fact that other developers have also faced a loss of productivity when working with Grails.

The "convention over configuration" approach speeds up development and keeps the learning curve fairly easy for most developers, but the list of open issues on the Jira suggests that there are still some aspects that need tuning - or detuning in some cases (e.g. domain objects not having GORM functionality due to something missing in lazy decoration/injection).

I've been wondering what sort of risks are involved when you use a software product that is essentially just providing a layer of abstraction over several loosely related other products.

For example, what can you do if you want to upgrade to a later version of one of the underlying technologies (for a fixed bug, or to use a new feature), when the layer above that hasn't been tested or made configurable for that new release? At present, I would expect that you would be stuck with whatever version is compatible with your version of Grails. This could change once OSGi becomes a bit more mainstream, allowing for the use of multiple versions of the same libraries within a single application. I wouldn't want to rely on that being the saviour of any application of mine though.

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