The Jump to 1.1x
As I blogged recently, I rebooted the noisyheads project again this month. And among the changes that were included in reenergizing this project again is to move to Grails 1.1x. The previous stable build of noisyheads was using Grails 1.0.4. I made a fresh start using Grails 1.1-beta, which was what was available during the time I started a new tree. Then switched immediately to 1.1-RC1 when it came out. Although 1.1-RC2 has been released, I am still finishing some tasks before I make the move again. Wew, really quick release process. Go Grails community! I was assuming I’m gonna finish this project just in time as 1.1 final comes out. Looks like I’m gonna release way later than that :-p
I was kinda disappointed not to see JPA support yet. I expected that for 1.1. Nice to have though, but doesn’t really matter at the moment anyway. Although I am a Maven zealot, I couldn’t care less about the Maven integration that was created. Just too different. I already made known my thoughts on that matter.
Lots of lovely improvements and changes which I have yet to fully utilize. GORM looks more powerful. I have been using the new test framework methods as I try to get at least 90% code coverage. Previously, all I cared about were integration tests. Now I’m more inclined to unit test some more.
Among the changes that bugged me includes the need to invoke the toCharArray() method on config properties. A little puzzled on this bit. I’m sure what I see is a Map toString() value being shown if I don’t explicitly grab the char array value. I saw also a deprecation message stating that the controller property “allowedMethods” should be declared now as “static.” Semantically probably cleaner, but undocumented besides the warning.
Finally, I’m kinda not digging the more universal grails plugin placement. I still like to see the bundled plugins of my app in it’s source tree. I got kinda lost looking where they went. Only to find they all are in .grails/<grails version>/.. Now there’re two places for me to look. My hidden plugin directory, and my main Grails app directory. When I wanted to check the source codes of the plugin I just installed then, it’s just right there a few millis below. I could imagine this new directory ballooning, each and every time you create a grails app. Wonder if conflicts happen if you create two or more grails app with the same name. Hmm.. Do you really monitor hidden directories? At least when I delete my grails app back then, I’m pretty sure all files are cleaned out. But then again I’m on a Mac. Nothing new about “uninstalling” stuff there.
All-in-all, change doesn’t really impact me much. I have no idea if there are new 1.1-ways that I should start doing and dump speaking in 1.0.x-parlance.
