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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