Category: Grails

Grails 3.3 Integration Testing with Spock Mocks

It is easy to use the Spock Framework, shipped with Grails, to mock or stub a collaborator (such as a service) in our Grails unit tests.

The Testing chapter explains a bit about mocking collaborators, doWithSpring/doWithConfig callback methods, the FreshRuntime annotation to mock beans in tests — but they’re mainly for unit testing.

How about mocking beans in an integration test?

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Grails Anti-Pattern: Everything is a Service

The context

Grails makes it very easy to put any logic of your application in a service. Just grails create-service and you’re good to go. There’s a single instance by default, injectable anywhere. Powerful stuff and makes it easy to get up ‘n running very fast!

Creating a new application, following so-called “best practices” from blogs like these 🙂 and the ‘idiomatic Grails-way’ described in the docs and in tutorials work in the beginning, but there’s always a tipping point — where the application has grown a reasonable size — where one should start following a different, maybe less-Grailsey, strategy.

So what can go wrong by creating services in your application?

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Grails Anti-Pattern: Locally Optimized Dynamic Finders Everywhere

The context

Grails makes it very easy to persist and find stuff using domain classes. It uses GORM (Grails’ Object Relational Mapping) under the hood, which by default uses Hibernate to map domain classes to tables in a database. Powerful stuff and makes it easy to get up ‘n running very fast!

Creating a new application, following so-called “best practices” from blogs like these 🙂 and the ‘idiomatic Grails-way’ described in the docs and in tutorials work in the beginning, but there’s always a tipping point — where the application has grown a reasonable size — where one should start following a different, maybe less-Grailsey, strategy.

So what can go wrong by using dynamic finders on a domain class?

Continue reading “Grails Anti-Pattern: Locally Optimized Dynamic Finders Everywhere” →