Live grails site launch...

[j pimmel]

O Hai

Well, we're here still and we're live... The guys here: Robert Fletcher, Kris L, myself and the other 15 odd devs, are pleased to announce a go live on an all Grails/Groovy site..

The content is bound to amuse and titillate even, but while the content wasnt of our choosing, the technology sure was.

http://showbiz.sky.com

The work isnt over yet, but we'd like to thank all of those on here who have helped out with problems, to Graeme et al who are doing a sterling job I'm told (sadly i couldnt come out to Lower Marsh the other day) and hopefully another solid milestone to mark the growing successes of Grails n groovy..

Rob would have wanted to be the one announcing, but seeing as he is probably in the Kruger Game Reserve or someplace wild like that right now, I dont think he will mind too much that i took the wind from the sails...

Cheers

j

[Marcos Silva Pereira]

Wow, nice. I like the effects over the photos here: http://showbiz.sky.com/celebs :-)

Could you please give us more detail about what you found amazing, good and bad when develop using Grails?

Kind Regards

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 3:04 PM, j pimmel <frankly.watson@...> wrote:

O Hai

Well, we're here still and we're live... The guys here: Robert Fletcher, Kris L, myself and the other 15 odd devs, are pleased to announce a go live on an all Grails/Groovy site..

The content is bound to amuse and titillate even, but while the content wasnt of our choosing, the technology sure was.

http://showbiz.sky.com

The work isnt over yet, but we'd like to thank all of those on here who have helped out with problems, to Graeme et al who are doing a sterling job I'm told (sadly i couldnt come out to Lower Marsh the other day) and hopefully another solid milestone to mark the growing successes of Grails n groovy..

Rob would have wanted to be the one announcing, but seeing as he is probably in the Kruger Game Reserve or someplace wild like that right now, I dont think he will mind too much that i took the wind from the sails...

Cheers

j

--
Marcos Silva Pereira
http://marcospereira.wordpress.com
"You only live once.", James Brown

[Alexander Koehn]

Nice site and nice pictures.. ;-)

I'm also interested in more informations and details about your  
project and grails development....

Cheers
Alex


Am 13.03.2008 um 00:55 schrieb Marcos Silva Pereira:

> Wow, nice. I like the effects over the photos here:
> http://showbiz.sky.com/celebs :-)
>
> Could you please give us more detail about what you found amazing,  
> good and
> bad when develop using Grails?
>
> Kind Regards
>
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 3:04 PM, j pimmel <frankly.watson@...
> >
> wrote:
>
>> O Hai
>>
>> Well, we're here still and we're live... The guys here: Robert  
>> Fletcher,
>> Kris L, myself and the other 15 odd devs, are pleased to announce a  
>> go live
>> on an all Grails/Groovy site..
>>
>> The content is bound to amuse and titillate even, but while the  
>> content
>> wasnt of our choosing, the technology sure was.
>>
>> http://showbiz.sky.com
>>
>> The work isnt over yet, but we'd like to thank all of those on here  
>> who
>> have helped out with problems, to Graeme et al who are doing a  
>> sterling job
>> I'm told (sadly i couldnt come out to Lower Marsh the other day) and
>> hopefully another solid milestone to mark the growing successes of  
>> Grails n
>> groovy..
>>
>> Rob would have wanted to be the one announcing, but seeing as he is
>> probably in the Kruger Game Reserve or someplace wild like that  
>> right now, I
>> dont think he will mind too much that i took the wind from the  
>> sails...
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> j
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Marcos Silva Pereira
> http://marcospereira.wordpress.com
> "You only live once.", James Brown

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[glaforge]

Waoo, congratulations!

Don't forget to add a link to your site on the Grails success story page:
http://grails.org/Success+Stories

;-)

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 7:04 PM, j pimmel <frankly.watson@...> wrote:

> O Hai
>
> Well, we're here still and we're live... The guys here: Robert Fletcher,
> Kris L, myself and the other 15 odd devs, are pleased to announce a go live
> on an all Grails/Groovy site..
>
> The content is bound to amuse and titillate even, but while the content
> wasnt of our choosing, the technology sure was.
>
> http://showbiz.sky.com
>
> The work isnt over yet, but we'd like to thank all of those on here who have
> helped out with problems, to Graeme et al who are doing a sterling job I'm
> told (sadly i couldnt come out to Lower Marsh the other day) and hopefully
> another solid milestone to mark the growing successes of Grails n groovy..
>
> Rob would have wanted to be the one announcing, but seeing as he is probably
> in the Kruger Game Reserve or someplace wild like that right now, I dont
> think he will mind too much that i took the wind from the sails...
>
> Cheers
>
> j
>
>

--
Guillaume Laforge
Groovy Project Manager
G2One, Inc. Vice-President Technology
http://www.g2one.com

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[j pimmel]

Hi there Marco/All,

Well this particular feedback we'll give in greater detail in the coming week but some of the things that are clear are tool support - needs improving, as we all know. Performance was a *big* concern, and to be honest if we didnt have the CDN, hardcore Loadbalancer / Web caching hardware that between them all defer the load, we'd definately have needed a very much larger host of servers to manage.. The site had a heavy load exceeding 1M requests in the first 24hrs, which we've been warned is pretty low levels of load - sure only about 3-4% of that end up being controller calls, but still ..

We also had various complexities involving configuration since we have something like 8 different environments, and we ended up writing a custom plugin to help automate config setup for the respective environment.

If we manage to spend some time conducting a kind of sunset review then we'll feed back what we can to the list..

In terms of getting grails ready for even more primetime, maybe its worth having some section in the docs which goes to the heart of what you need to consider / get right about Grails/groovy code (ie: how u use GORM, size(), list(), closures, configs etc ) to help ready and optimise code for production use by folks out there.. ? Just a thought...

J

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 11:55 PM, Marcos Silva Pereira <marcos.silva@...> wrote:

Wow, nice. I like the effects over the photos here: http://showbiz.sky.com/celebs :-)

Could you please give us more detail about what you found amazing, good and bad when develop using Grails?

Kind Regards

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 3:04 PM, j pimmel <frankly.watson@...> wrote:

O Hai

Well, we're here still and we're live... The guys here: Robert Fletcher, Kris L, myself and the other 15 odd devs, are pleased to announce a go live on an all Grails/Groovy site..

The content is bound to amuse and titillate even, but while the content wasnt of our choosing, the technology sure was.

http://showbiz.sky.com

The work isnt over yet, but we'd like to thank all of those on here who have helped out with problems, to Graeme et al who are doing a sterling job I'm told (sadly i couldnt come out to Lower Marsh the other day) and hopefully another solid milestone to mark the growing successes of Grails n groovy..

Rob would have wanted to be the one announcing, but seeing as he is probably in the Kruger Game Reserve or someplace wild like that right now, I dont think he will mind too much that i took the wind from the sails...

Cheers

j

--
Marcos Silva Pereira
http://marcospereira.wordpress.com
"You only live once.", James Brown

[j pimmel]

What specifically are you interested to know... theres a lot going on !

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 6:39 AM, Alexander Köhn <alibasta@...> wrote:

Nice site and nice pictures.. ;-)

I'm also interested in more informations and details about your
project and grails development....

Cheers
Alex


Am 13.03.2008 um 00:55 schrieb Marcos Silva Pereira:

> Wow, nice. I like the effects over the photos here:
> http://showbiz.sky.com/celebs :-)
>
> Could you please give us more detail about what you found amazing,
> good and
> bad when develop using Grails?
>
> Kind Regards
>
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 3:04 PM, j pimmel <frankly.watson@...
> >
> wrote:
>
>> O Hai
>>
>> Well, we're here still and we're live... The guys here: Robert
>> Fletcher,
>> Kris L, myself and the other 15 odd devs, are pleased to announce a
>> go live
>> on an all Grails/Groovy site..
>>
>> The content is bound to amuse and titillate even, but while the
>> content
>> wasnt of our choosing, the technology sure was.
>>
>> http://showbiz.sky.com
>>
>> The work isnt over yet, but we'd like to thank all of those on here
>> who
>> have helped out with problems, to Graeme et al who are doing a
>> sterling job
>> I'm told (sadly i couldnt come out to Lower Marsh the other day) and
>> hopefully another solid milestone to mark the growing successes of
>> Grails n
>> groovy..
>>
>> Rob would have wanted to be the one announcing, but seeing as he is
>> probably in the Kruger Game Reserve or someplace wild like that
>> right now, I
>> dont think he will mind too much that i took the wind from the
>> sails...
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> j
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Marcos Silva Pereira
> http://marcospereira.wordpress.com
> "You only live once.", James Brown

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[glaforge]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:49 AM, j pimmel
<frankly.watson@...> wrote:
> [...]
> In terms of getting grails ready for even more primetime, maybe its worth
> having some section in the docs which goes to the heart of what you need to
> consider / get right about Grails/groovy code (ie: how u use GORM, size(),
> list(), closures, configs etc ) to help ready and optimise code for
> production use by folks out there.. ? Just a thought...

Your feedback on this would be very interesting to hear about!
If you could collect your thoughts, and the tricks you've discovered,
solutions you've found, that would be awesome!

--
Guillaume Laforge
Groovy Project Manager
G2One, Inc. Vice-President Technology
http://www.g2one.com

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[Kris Lander]

Hi,

If we can officially, then we certainly will. Like Jerome said when
the dust settles we'd be happy to share some of our experiences. When
we met Graeme last month we did talk about doing some kind of case
study perhaps. Either way, we'd certainly like to give something back.

It's a shame you guys cannot see the editor side of the application
which is really where all the whizzy and interesting functionality
lives.

If I had to talk about one area which we have invested time in, it's
around aspects of extensibility when we've attempted to push Grails
(and plugins) that bit beyond their "normal" usage. For big
application, with complex requirements and architectures this is
inevitable. Sometimes this has been delightfully easy and sometimes
this has been perhaps more difficult than it should have been. For
example, we've definitely got one too many patches to various
grails/plugin scripts than we'd like. ;)

A good framework always goes to great lengths to provide all sorts of
nice hooks to make it painless to cleanly extend the framework. I
think this is especially true when you have a language like Groovy
that has such powerful features like dynamic method injection. ;)
We've run into a few issues with compatibility of plugins and our own
code because we (or plugin code) has some "creative" code. This is
quite possibly our (or others) naivety some of the time, but as grails
matures as a framework I think this is going to become increasingly
important, especially for plugin developers. That said things are
currently a long way from being bad.

Despite a lot of frustration in the early days getting to grips with a
new language, new framework and tool support which isn't as
comprehensive as Java is today, we've had a lot of fun and I can
honestly say I hope I never have to write another web application in
Java again. :-)

-Kris


On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 7:02 AM, Guillaume Laforge <glaforge@...> wrote:

> Waoo, congratulations!
>
>  Don't forget to add a link to your site on the Grails success story page:
>  http://grails.org/Success+Stories
>
>  ;-)
>
>
>  On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 7:04 PM, j pimmel <frankly.watson@...> wrote:
>
>
> > O Hai
>  >
>  > Well, we're here still and we're live... The guys here: Robert Fletcher,
>  > Kris L, myself and the other 15 odd devs, are pleased to announce a go live
>  > on an all Grails/Groovy site..
>  >
>  > The content is bound to amuse and titillate even, but while the content
>  > wasnt of our choosing, the technology sure was.
>  >
>  > http://showbiz.sky.com
>  >
>  > The work isnt over yet, but we'd like to thank all of those on here who have
>  > helped out with problems, to Graeme et al who are doing a sterling job I'm
>  > told (sadly i couldnt come out to Lower Marsh the other day) and hopefully
>  > another solid milestone to mark the growing successes of Grails n groovy..
>  >
>  > Rob would have wanted to be the one announcing, but seeing as he is probably
>  > in the Kruger Game Reserve or someplace wild like that right now, I dont
>  > think he will mind too much that i took the wind from the sails...
>  >
>  > Cheers
>  >
>  > j
>  >
>  >
>
>
>
>  --
>  Guillaume Laforge
>  Groovy Project Manager
>  G2One, Inc. Vice-President Technology
>  http://www.g2one.com
>
>
>
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>
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>
>
>

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[rtayek]

At 09:18 AM 3/13/2008, you wrote:
>...
>If we can officially, then we certainly will. Like Jerome said when
>the dust settles we'd be happy to share some of our experiences. When
>we met Graeme last month we did talk about doing some kind of case
>study perhaps. Either way, we'd certainly like to give something back.

one of your team (paul campbell) posted a note about your using an
agile process. please consider sharing anything you can about unit
testing domain objects, testing controllers (mock seems to be
broken), and how the overall testing code structure and organization
differs from what one would find in a typical java/junit web app

thanks

---
vice-chair http://ocjug.org/



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[felipenasc]

A case study would be fantastic.

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 3:15 PM, Ray Tayek <rtayek@...> wrote:

> At 09:18 AM 3/13/2008, you wrote:
>  >...
>
> >If we can officially, then we certainly will. Like Jerome said when
>  >the dust settles we'd be happy to share some of our experiences. When
>  >we met Graeme last month we did talk about doing some kind of case
>  >study perhaps. Either way, we'd certainly like to give something back.
>
>  one of your team (paul campbell) posted a note about your using an
>  agile process. please consider sharing anything you can about unit
>  testing domain objects, testing controllers (mock seems to be
>  broken), and how the overall testing code structure and organization
>  differs from what one would find in a typical java/junit web app
>
>  thanks
>
>  ---
>  vice-chair http://ocjug.org/
>
>
>
>
>
>  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>  To unsubscribe from this list, please visit:
>
>     http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
>
>
>

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[Kris Lander]

When you talk about unit tests are you talking about Unit tests that
are completely stand-alone from a grails application or the
"integration" unit tests that allow you to test with full access to
the Grails environment. (e.g. for domain objects you can do things
like call GORM methods)?

To answer your question in a more general sense, I haven't really
found that much difference in our approach. It was really just getting
used to the mocking framework that Groovy provides and using Expando
objects and understanding the Grails environment itself with regards
to "integration" unit tests. I haven't come across anything that I'd
describe as broken, though I do wish I could write more pure unit test
sometimes, because when you have the kind of test coverage we have,
speed is of the essence. They are slow, especially when you are
running them repeatedly in isolation.

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 6:15 PM, Ray Tayek <rtayek@...> wrote:

> At 09:18 AM 3/13/2008, you wrote:
>  >...
>
> >If we can officially, then we certainly will. Like Jerome said when
>  >the dust settles we'd be happy to share some of our experiences. When
>  >we met Graeme last month we did talk about doing some kind of case
>  >study perhaps. Either way, we'd certainly like to give something back.
>
>  one of your team (paul campbell) posted a note about your using an
>  agile process. please consider sharing anything you can about unit
>  testing domain objects, testing controllers (mock seems to be
>  broken), and how the overall testing code structure and organization
>  differs from what one would find in a typical java/junit web app
>
>  thanks
>
>  ---
>  vice-chair http://ocjug.org/
>
>
>
>
>
>  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>  To unsubscribe from this list, please visit:
>
>     http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
>
>
>

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[rtayek]

At 02:34 PM 3/13/2008, you wrote:
>When you talk about unit tests are you talking about Unit tests that
>are completely stand-alone from a grails application

yes, no grails environment. there may not be to much here unless
there is a deep domain model or you try to mock some of the grails environment.

>or the
>"integration" unit tests that allow you to test with full access to
>the Grails environment. (e.g. for domain objects you can do things
>like call GORM methods)?

any info about these would be good.


>To answer your question in a more general sense, I haven't really
>found that much difference in our approach.

ok

>  It was really just getting
>used to the mocking framework that Groovy provides and using Expando
>objects and understanding the Grails environment itself with regards
>to "integration" unit tests. I haven't come across anything that I'd
>describe as broken,

we had some trouble geting the controller tests to work using mocks.

>though I do wish I could write more pure unit test
>sometimes, because when you have the kind of test coverage we have,
>speed is of the essence. They are slow, especially when you are
>running them repeatedly in isolation.

bummer, how slow are they?

thanks

>On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 6:15 PM, Ray Tayek <rtayek@...> wrote:
> > At 09:18 AM 3/13/2008, you wrote:
> >  >...
> >
> > >If we can officially, then we certainly will. Like Jerome said when
> >  >the dust settles we'd be happy to share some of our experiences. When
> >  >we met Graeme last month we did talk about doing some kind of case
> >  >study perhaps. Either way, we'd certainly like to give something back.
> >
> >  one of your team (paul campbell) posted a note about your using an
> >  agile process. please consider sharing anything you can about unit
> >  testing domain objects, testing controllers (mock seems to be
> >  broken), and how the overall testing code structure and organization
> >  differs from what one would find in a typical java/junit web app ...

---
vice-chair http://ocjug.org/



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[Robert Fletcher]

Hi all,

Just wanted to chip in and say the site's looking good. I picked the
wrong time to go on holiday and missed the launch date. I can however
confirm that the site is reasonably snappy given the page weight even
from an internet cafe in Graaff-Reinet, Eastern Cape Province.

With regards to testing, I did get involved in a thread a while back
with some thoughts on our approach to testing. Basically we've used
primarily "integration" JUnit tests, although frequently making use of
MockFor/StubFor. Mainly this is because the wiring Grails does for you
in integration tests (particularly of controllers and taglibs) is so
damned useful, hence we've tended to stick the test in integration
test so that we get request, response, dynamic methods, etc. given to
us by the Grails framework but still use MockFor/StubFor to mock out
collaborators within our app. This is maybe a little naive as it
probably costs us something in spring context init time that we're not
really using all that much.

I have to say also that integration testing some of the persistence
stuff has been invaluable. Using obj.save(flush: true) followed by
clearing the hibernate session then reading stuff back from the db to
ensure it got persisted in the way we thought it should and setting up
test fixture data in setUp() and flushing/clearing the session so that
controllers are picking real stuff up from a db has helped us avoid,
work round and test our way through a number of pitfalls (hence a few
JIRAs we've raised or voted on that have subsequently been fixed).

We do have some straight up unit tests as well as webtests and
selenium tests (via a plugin written by one of our guys - we may try
migrating to the 'official' plugin now there is one). Overall our
coverage is very thorough although our approach is in places a little
unstructured.

Anyway that's quite enough thinking about work when I'm supposed to be
on holiday. Congratulations to the other guys for the successful
launch (I'm sure I'll hear about all the last minute panic hacks when
I get back) and thanks to the Grails community for the interest and
the support. Like Kris says, it's a pity we can't show off the
editorial 'back-end' of the system as that's where a lot of the effort
has gone over the 4 months development time.

Cheers,
Rob

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