Groovy And Grails Consultant Chicago, Agile Web Development Experts

Groovy and Grails – an insight into the Basic Features

2010-02-18T22:44:00.000-08:00

Groovy and Grails is a dynamic language web application combination similar to Ruby on Rails but offering greater productivity benefits. Developers prefer using Groovy and Grails as it allows them to create feature rich applications in weeks rather than months.

What is Grails?
Grails is an open source web application platform that helps developers increase their productivity through different principles. The platform helps developers to follow agile methodology and develop rich applications in stipulated time. Grails supports the creation of quality applications, which are user friendly and have a great visual appeal. Grails is apt for developing web applications as it naturally supports java application development and is based on Groovy, a dynamic language for the Java platform.

Important Features:
Grails is easy to learn and integrates a number of powerful features. Grails incorporates a number of remarkable features –

• It uses existing Java technologies including Hibernate and Spring under a consistent interface
• It provides a user friendly framework which is consistent, lowering the possibility of errors
• It provides documentation for components of framework important for users
• It offers robust and easy to deploy view templates using Groovy Server Pages (GSP) and tag libraries to develop web page components
• It offers Ajax support which can be customized
• It provides sample applications, which gives an idea about the framework’s capabilities

What is Groovy?
Groovy is the programming language for the Java Platform that provides Java-like syntax, which is easy to learn for most Java developers. Features in other languages such as Ruby, Python or Smalltalk are available in Groovy. Groovy has the capability to define internal Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) used as an abstraction layer to allow non technical subject matter experts codify business rules.

Important Features:
• Features that give Groovy an edge over Java are:
• Both Static and Dynamic typing
• Closures
• Operator Overloading
• Native syntax for lists and Associative arrays
• Native support for regular expressions
• Polymorphic iteration
• Expressions inside strings
• Additional helper methods

Organizations can easily select Groovy and Grails Technologies with confidence to receive maximum productivity. Be with us to know more about this technology.

Agile Web Devlopment With Groovy And Grails

2009-11-18T02:21:00.000-08:00

Groovy is a Dynamic scripting language for Java Virtual Machine and Grails is an open source web application framework and can solve lot many pieces of the web development puzzle through the core technology and it’s plug-ins. Since grails built it majorly complements java applications development.

Grails is most popular and advanced in open source web application development. It is very fast to deliver quality applications and even easy to use. Groovy includes features found in Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk, but uses syntax similar to the Java programming language which makes groovy similar to java and enable it to achieve level of integration with java.

Grails have many features which makes it more popular

XML Capabilities

Have XML Capabilities

Grails Object Relational Mapping (GORM)

GORM is Grails' object relational mapping (ORM) implementation. GORM supports Event registration in database whenever any event occurs like insert, update and delete.
Hibernate gives it a powerful advantage when it comes to advanced ORM capabilities.

Supports dynamic encode/decode methods

Grails supports the concept of dynamic encode/decode methods to secure database.

Groovy Server Pages (GSP)

Grails' view technology, designed for users to familiar with technologies such as ASP and JSP.

Supports Multiple AJAX Frameworks

It supports Many AJAX frameworks for agile web development

Flexible

It is more flexible compare to any other programming language

In short We can say that the integration of Groovy and Grails glorifies the Java application development process more productive and agile.

Groovy and Grails Testing Methods

2009-10-22T06:36:00.000-07:00

Hello Friends,

I would like to share a brief note about us in the beginning of the post. We are Chicago based Groovy and Grails Consultant working on Groovy and Grails development. To-day, I am going to share few thoughts about the concepts of testing in the Grails.

Grails supports the following concept of testing,
1. Unit testing – As the name suggest that testing a particular part of code or code block without considering surrounding infrastructure. There are several mock methods available for this, few of them are, Groovy Mock or ExpandoMetaClass. Alternatively, you could using the Testing plugin.

2. Integration testing - Grails uses a for integration tests and clear out all the data from the database in between each test.

3. Functional testing – As the name suggest, it includes the testing of the actual running application. Functional testing can be done using Canoo WebTest plug-in.

Now, Testing just not stops here, One needs to test all layers of testing in Grails. There are few things to consider while testing the layers.

- For testing the domain entities one need to write the unit tests to check the validation process.
- For testing the various services, one needs to write the unit and integration test to make sure that all services are running.
- For testing the controllers, one needs to write the unit and integration tests to make sure that controllers are working as needed.