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?

Debugging Grails 3, Spring Boot or Gradle with Eclipse

This is a small post for those who’s primary IDE is Eclipse for developing Grails 3 apps or plugins — and are still wondering how to debug their application.

First of all, to clarify: there’s no “Grails” debugging, it’s just Spring Boot and Gradle these days, with Grails 3. Any way to debug these kind of applications allows you to debug a Grails 3 application.

There’s lots of SO posts and Google hits about this subject, so I’m creating this post also as a short “simplest solution” summary for myself and for others.

JavaOne 2016

It’s been a great week at JavaOne 2016! Here’s a photo I took just before Gwen Stefani and Sting came on stage at the Oracle Appreciation Event in the AT&T Park in San Fransisco, home of baseball’s World Series-winning San Francisco Giants. What a crowd! What a week.

The Librarian: Introduction to Test-Driven Development

This will be a series of articles revolving around unit testing where I will work through examples and exploring various aspects of the craft. This is the first installment.

The code associated with this article can be found on GitHub. Future and past installments can be found in The Librarian Archive.

I will try to implement a few requirements for a Library module with books and memberships, extending whatever code we have in a test-driven style (“TDD”) as we go along. I share a few thoughts about the process, show some refactorings and give a few hints for using the IDE.

The level of this article is for junior developers who want to expand their testing horizon.

There’s plenty of information out there which describes what TDD or Test-Driven Development is, the red-green-refactor cycle etc so I won’t delve into too much introductory detail here. See the references at the end for more background-information.

Instead, just get started!