My previous attempts to find a code generator that worked for me led me nowhere. One of my collegues at work mentioned Grails, a framework based on Groovy, a scripting language close to Java in syntax and runs on a JVM. Grails is ‘Groovy on Rails’, a Groovy implementation of Ruby on Rails.
Ok, now we’re talking. I had a hard time picking up Ruby On Rails because I couldn’t get my head around the Ruby syntax, but I can see the benefits on the RoR approach.
Grails gets me to a place I’m comfortable with, and a language I can work with – I can generate my CRUD application based on my Entities and then take it from there. This is looking good. So far I have generated just a small test app to see how it hangs together, and have modified some of the generated .gsp pages – this is looking very promising so far.
I have to say I am pretty excited about Grails. I have a small project for a client to build an online store, so I’m going to be investigating building it with Grails and will see how far I get. Here’s my first post about some MySQL issues, but now I’ve resolved those I’m on the way.