Major UK brand launches Grails based site

Hi all,

We've just launched the new site for one of PepsiCo UK's well known  
juice brands, Copella:

http://www.copellafruitjuices.co.uk

The DNS is still propagating so if you're not redirected to http://
www.copellafruitjuices.co.uk/content/view/home then you're looking at  
the old non-Grails site still.

Anyway this site is still a work in progress (is not necessarily  
valid XHTML yet etc) as we have had marketing-led deadlines and also  
have another major project to launch on Monday with Grails, so we're  
a bit too busy to finish the full projects this week!

Thank you to everyone on the Grails team who contributed to fixes and  
listened to my panicked and often simple RTFM questions - especially  
Marcel, Jeff, Jason and Graeme without whom it wouldn't really have  
been possible. HTML escaping, sensible SQL Schema creation,  
reloadable I18N messages and numerous Grails patches and Groovy  
voodoo were all required to make this site, stuff that wasn't in  
Grails until a couple of weeks ago. There's no way I could have coded  
all of those in the time available.

The web site - for it is not truly a web application in the Web 2.0  
sense - is fairly basic currently. We have form data capture and  
emailing and visitor detail remembering/tracking, which is simple and  
yet quite sophisticated and builds upon work we did on previous  
brands before we used Grails.

The recipes and News sections draw from a grails MySQL database,  
currently with no caching but it's nippy enough for now. I am pleased  
with the tabs on that page :) The data for the these is entered using  
scaffolding, believe it or not, purely because it is a quick and  
dirty way to get a "CMS" of sorts up there for our internal guys to use.

We use GSP throughout.

We have used some advanced/modified taglibs for our forms and  
navigation. The results on forms I'm particularly pleased with as it  
is very configurable without editing the taglib itself - so the web  
designers controlled the way fields were rendered without requiring  
work from me. This taglib, an extension and refinement of the  
contributed BeanTagLib concept, is currently called ModelTagLib and  
will be on the contrib page soon, probably tomorrow. There's also an  
embryonic "I18N" taglib with a country selection box and others, and  
improvements to FormTagLib to support "no current selection" options  
in selects amongst other things.

Soon we have some other features being added to the site, but most of  
the new work will be on the next project which launches in early form  
Monday but will probably not be fully featured until later in  
February, along with the final Copella site.

Our HTML/PHP coder was originally sceptical of Grails but now he's  
steaming ahead with the second project within a matter of hours, he  
is very impressed with Grails now he has found his feet :)

One of the primary patterns I found that helped immensely with this  
project was a ContentController that uses the id param to know what  
view to load from views/content/ - this stops you needing an action  
for every page in your site, and every page in our site is  
effectively dynamic as they require navigation data (taken from a  
reloadable service) amongst other things. Currently this is the  
easiest way to achieve this until Grails adds support for "global"  
interceptors so that you can just shove your content pages into web-app/

Anyway thanks again - and its exciting to have a high profile brand  
using Grails :)

There will be more to come in 2007 :)

Kind regards,
Marc

~ ~ ~
Marc Palmer (marc@...)
Consultant/Analyst
AnyWare Ltd.
http://www.anyware.co.uk/


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