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?