Use Cases of #Grails in Web Applications - Type of applications most appropriate to be developed in Grails - Type of applications where Grails may not be the best choice - Experiences with Grails during several web application development projects

1. Use Cases of Grails in
Web Applications
Sunil Prakash Inteti
Xebia

2. SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT DONE RIGHT
Netherlands | USA | India | France | UK

3. Agenda
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About me
Expectation out of the session
Grails Introduction
Why Grails
Common use cases - Grails plugins
Issues using Grails
Who is using Grails

4. • Sunil Prakash Inteti
• Senior consultant,
Xebia IT Architechts
• 28 years
• Bible
• Worked with clients in
US, Europe, Australia

6. Enterprise web applications

7. Grails Introduction
• Web Development framework inspired by Ruby
on Rails
o Convention over Configuration
o DRY – Do Not Repeat Yourself
o More focused on domain objects than Rails
• Underlying Libraries:
o Hibernate
o Spring
o SiteMesh
o Quartz
o J2EE / Servlet

8. Why Grails ?
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JVM based
Groovy’s fast learning curve
Based on Spring, Hibernate, sitemesh
Productive
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Lot of CRUD fucntionality scaffolding
GORM
Agile development, fast prototyping
Environment specific properties

10. Plugins
• A core concept in Grails
– Unit of Functionality
– Unit of Reusability
– Unit of Integration
• Creating a plugin is almost identical to creating an
application
• Over 700 Plugins in all sorts of areas
– Central Repository
– http://grails.org/plugin/home

12. Quartz
class MyJob {
static triggers = {
cron name: 'myTrigger', cronExpression: "0 0 6 * * ?"
}
def group = "MyGroup" def group = "MyGroup"
def execute(){
print "Job run!"
}
}

13. More plugins..
• Spring security
o Authentication and Authorization
• Mail plugin
o mailService which has the send mail method
o Injected into all the controllers
• Jquery
• Test Code Coverage Plugin
o Cobertura
o grails test-app-cobertura
• Grails REST Plugin
• Joda time

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Simple Captcha Plugin
Grails AWS Plugin
Solr plugin
Twitter plugin
Cloud Foundry Integration

17. Mobile apps
• Exposing rest services is easy in Grails
// Automatic marshalling of XML and JSON
import grails.converters.*
…
render Book.list(params) as JSON
render Book.get(params.id) as XML

19. grails install-plugin backbonejs

21. Issues with Grails
• Performance intensive core backend systems
• Unnecessary objects created in groovy. This triggers garbage
collection frequently.
• Garbage collection generally makes applications slower which
is not convenient.
•
Need to give more memory to Permgen space than a java
application

22. Performance numbers
METHOD JAVA [NS]
Pojos
117.914
Quicksort
68.728
GRAILS[NS]
856.337
330.159
FACTOR
7.26
4.80

23. Companies using Grails
Atlassian
Big Lots – core site
CollabNet – web interface to SVN server
Dell - Enstratius
Disney
eHarmony
EMC
Epic Games
Ericsson
ESPN
Fidelity Investments
IEEE
LinkedIn – Recruiter application
LiveNation – TicketWeb
Live Gamer
Lucasfilm
Nissan – Leaf site
Nokia
Qualcomm
Symantec
T-Mobile – internal apps
Lyris
MoneyGram
MTV (and Viacom by extension)
Netflix – Asgard, their Amazon EC2 cloud
management app, now open sourced.
Volkswagen - UK site
Walmart – MP3 streaming site (now defunct)
The Washington Post
Wired.com
Sky – (UK) TV listings, movies, and showbiz
sites
Vodafone Music – (UK) core site

27. Enterprise Web Apps
Application Design and Development
Application Design and Development
Middleware Development
Middleware Development
Back End Integration
Back End Integration
Highly Scalable Applications
Highly Scalable Applications
Custom Application Development
Custom Application Development
Rich Internet Applications
Rich Internet Applications
Technologies
-Scala (Language), Akka, Spray, Lift, Play
, HTML5, CSS3, Backbone.js, AngularJS

28. Contact us @
Websites
www.xebia.in
www.xebia.com
www.xebia.fr
Xebia India
infoindia@xebia.com
Thought Leadership
Htto://xebee.xebia.in
http://blog.xebia.com
http://podcast.xebia.com