Re: 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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