It’s a little-known fact that I’m a part-owner of one of the most uncool Grails startups in the known world. We don’t have Webscale issues, we don’t have staff beanbags,  in fact we don’t even offer a cloud-based solution. We install Grails-based software on hosts inside corporate environments. We do compliance software. Like Health and Safety and IT Security stuff. Nerdy in the extreme. But also very fun to work on, and, shock-horror, a sustainable [...]

I’ve had a great couple of days at OSDC 2011! Tuesday I was hanging out at the First Ever Australian GR8 Conference, spent Tuesday night with the CJUG boys, then have been presenting today on PhoneGap to the broader OSDC conference. Great times! Interesting this is definitely one of the hardest core developer communities I have hung out with. Hardly any Macbooks/iPhones in sight and Linux laptops and Android phones everywhere! People are really committed [...]

What a fantastic time we all had at SpringOne 2GX in Chicago over the last week. My head is jam packed full of information and I have so many new things to add to my list of cool Groovy tech to explore! If you’ve never made it to one (this was my first), I can highly recommend it! First things First: Relationships trump everything The absolute best part of these events is the chance to [...]

I’m just putting the final demo together for one of my sessions at SpringOne 2GX called “Does my DIV look big in this?” This talk brings together a whole bunch of technologies that I’ve been experimenting with for a while that help keep your view tier DRYer, namely: Grails Resources (for shrinking your dependencies) Various Grails and non-Grails DRY view technologies (including bean-fields, navigation, validation and other jQuery related goodness) Less.css for keeping your CSS [...]

If you’re having troubles with the Bean-Fields plugin on Grails 2.0.0.M2, there’s a quick workaround to get up and running. So if you see something like… Caused by GrailsTagException: Error executing tag <bean:form>: Cannot get property ‘class’ on null object You know you’ve tripped the issue. I’ve logged the issue in GPBEANFIELDS-40 but the root cause is actually not beanfields at all. It’s a breaking change introduced in Grails 2.0.0-M2 for performance improvements (GRAILS-8001). The change [...]

We’ve all been there. Maybe you were in a rush to get your latest Grails app out the door, or maybe it was a hobby project you were doing in your spare time and things just got out of hand. Hack code, click refresh, hack code, click refresh, (pause to complain about why Grails needs a restart), hack code, click refresh. You know the drill. Refresh-driven development (RDD). Either way you find yourself with a [...]

I’m just back from a fantastic time in Wellington, New Zealand, where I was doing some Grails training and speaking duties for Asia/Pacific User Group of SunGardHE. Wellington is a very beautiful place (albeit a little cold – and I *live* in a cold place!) and the local hosting team of Andrew/Dale/Keiryn where just fantastic in sorting everything out! On the first day I had a chance to speak with around 100 managers on the benefits [...]

I’ve run into this one a few times on Grails 1.3.x, and every time I have to go googling to sort it out – it’s time to write it down to speed up my Google searches! The error I end up with is typically something like: java.lang.LinkageError: loader constraint violation: loader (instance of <bootloader>) previously initiated loading for a different type with name “org/xml/sax/SAXParseException” If you get this on a project after installing a new [...]

I’ve been having the weirdest issue with Grails 2.0M1 (nee 1.4M1). My application ran fine with “grails run-app”, but would fail when did a “grails tomcat deploy” and deployed to either Tomcat 6 or Tomcat 7. The error I was getting was… ERROR initWebApplicationContext, Context initialization failed org.springframework.beans.factory.access.BootstrapException: Error executing bootstraps;  nested exception is java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot locate GORM API implementation. You either don’t have a GORM implementation installed (such as the Hibernate plugin) or you are [...]

You want to include a link to one of your Grails actions (say an AJAX target link) in one of your JavaScript files. What to do? Well you could just inline your JavaScript in your GSP file, right? Then you can just access all the GSP tags you like and the problem just goes away, right? <r:script> console.log(“Now hacking on ${assessment.id}”); $.ajax({ type: ‘GET’, url: “${g.createLink(action: ‘addThreat’)}”, data: { assessmentId : “${assessment.id}” }, /* more [...]