I just upgraded to latest Spock and Geb releases (0.5 and 0.5.1 respectively) but have had to undergo a strange sort of hell of odd errors before getting back on track. Turned out none of these were due to any actual code incompatibilities and eventually (after a couple of hours of fruitless head scratching) I got past them by running "grails clean" (which got me to some new errors) and finally by deleting ~/ivy2/cache. The latter step sadly seems to be required quite often when adding or upgrading plugins.

Personally I'm bitterly disappointed that Ivy (or Maven, if that's your poison), the so-called solutions to dependency hell, seems to introduce its own dependency nightmare more often than not. Of course every time you delete that Ivy cache folder you have to wait fifteen minutes the next time you run the app, whilst it downloads hundreds of jars. If you're on the train and not connected to t'Internet, you're really stuck.

I'm sure one day I'll grok what's really going on with this stuff, but for now I feel it ought to just work, but it really doesn't, and many people must waste a lot of time (or give up entirely) as a result.

I feverishly installed the latest Springsource Tool Suite release today – 2.5 RC1. Unfortunately it fairly swiftly started giving me the error shown below as I worked on my Grails project. It was popping up really frequently and would be a show-stopper if I couldn't fix it.

Screen shot 2010-10-15 at 20.50.43

It became apparent that it does this every time I saved a Groovy file that required my running Grails app to reload. It seems that STS didn't like the files in the 'target' folder changing as it recompiled, especially since I have  auto-refresh turned on in STS. I worked around this by setting up a rule for my project to exclude the target folder.

Right-click on the project, selected "Properties…" then Resource > Resource Filters. Add a filter to exclude the folder "target".

I've been slowly banging away at a small Grails app on the train to and from work, to teach myself Groovy the language and Grails the web framework. I already had a good familiarity with Java, Spring and Hibernate so it is mostly a case of learning what Groovy and Grails add on top of those. I've still got a long way to go, but I thought it worth jotting down some thoughts in case they help somebody else work their way into this particular world.

Overall, it's been fairly pleasant and I'm optimistic that it's probably as good a way to go about your average web app as any I've found before, and I've tried plenty over the past decade, including a few fairly obscure ones. I should point out that I don't believe in silver bullets any more. There are always going to be frustrations along the way when using any technology for a non-trivial project involving real-world customer requirements, but it's instructive to see just how many of those frustrations there are, and how hard they are to get past. I'm pleased to say that each time I've got a bit stuck with Grails I've been able to dig myself out fairly swiftly with the help of the existing documentation, other web resources, the #grails channel on freenode IRC and the grails-user mailing list. Furthermore, the principle of least surprise (POLS) is alive and well, meaning that when I hope that I'd find a particular feature to solve my problem du jour, it's usually there for me to find.

It's not all sunshine and roses though. For instance when I upgraded to Grails 1.3.3 my unit tests started failing with a strange and unhelpful stack trace emanating deep from within the guts of the plugin framework. Turns out this is a bug introduced in 1.3.3 that plenty of people have been caught out by. I've had to go back to 1.3.2 for now. It's a shade surprising and disappointing that a release could contain a bug like this, and that it's not been fixed and re-released yet. I worry that people trying Grails out for the first time with 1.3.3 will have a bad experience and give up early because of issues like this.

I had a struggle to find half decent tools. I've been a huge fan of Netbeans over the past several years and it claims to have great Groovy and Grails support, but I found it to be woeful I'm afraid. Common GSP tags completely confused the GSP editor (it claims the syntax is wrong) so I struggle to believe that those claiming it has this great support have actually tried developing a non-toy Grails app with it. I've settled on SpringSource Tool Suite (a bastardised Eclipse) which isn't bad – though as of this writing you definitely want to get the 2.3.3 M2 version for the latest Groovy and Grails support that's not yet in the stable release.

I'm currently getting to grips with Groovy and Grails. One major frustration that took a while to figure out was HTML escaping in GSP pages. Here's the simple lowdown, including at the end the important bit that I had struggled to realise, which is how to not escape specific strings when global HTML escaping is turned on.

Manual escaping

Out of the box (i.e. with a vanilla Grails app with default config) you need to explicitly escape any dangerous strings with the encodeAsHTML() function that Grails makes available on all Strings: ${dangerString.encodeAsHTML()}. This is a bit verbose, but at least it's very clear, and because it's just a method on String it's available everywhere in your app, not just in GSPs.

Auto-escaping with default codec

If you modify Config.groovy to contain grails.views.default.codec = "html" (which is there by default and set to "none") then it automatically calls encodeAsHTML() for you whenever you use ${} in GSPs. This is clearly quite a handy option and a much safer way of configuring things as it lessens the likelihood of slipping up and leaving a hole in your app.

Overriding auto-escaping per item

So far this is all exactly as per the Grails docs (which go into much more detail on codecs and what's really going on, including creating your own) but the crucial bit they fail to mention is what to do if you've turned on the global html codec, but have situations where you don't want escaping. The answer is to simply use the alternative JSP style interpolation syntax <%=mySafeHTMLString%> since the codec is only applied to ${}.

Overriding auto-escaping per page

You can also set the codec on a per-page basis, overriding that set in Config.groovy, with <%@page defaultCodec="html" %> or <%@page defaultCodec="none" %> as appropriate.

Overview

I've spent the past couple of weeks reading up on Grails, a web application framework inspired by Ruby on Rails. It takes advantage of Groovy, a dynamic programming language that runs on the JVM and is best described as a cross between Java and Ruby. Groovy has support for most existing Java syntax, but also a lot of Ruby-style syntax and dynamic features. To be honest I find that the Java aspects of Groovy (and Grails) drag the whole experience down a bit compared to writing Ruby, but it should be significantly nicer to work with than pure Java.

The big selling point of Groovy and Grails over Ruby on Rails comes from the compatibility with the whole Java ecosystem. You can have your clever dynamic language without giving up the Java libraries and deployment environments that your projects and customers may demand. This is clearly quite a compelling idea if like me you've got a long history of doing big Java web apps but have recently been converted to the dynamic cause.

One thing that is very important to realise is that Grails is not a port of Rails. It is in fact built on top of the Spring stack, including Spring MVC, REST support, dependency injection, transactionality and Hibernate amongst others. If you're already familiar with Spring this is probably a good thing, though I do worry that the framework on top of framework approach could lead to having more to learn (and mess up) overall.

Practical findings

My initial experiments showed an interesting result that rather worried me. I set up a domain class and a controller with def scaffold = true to provide built-in CRUD for my domain class. However the CRUD pages this presented were noticeably sluggish in the browser and benchmarking confirmed it could only manage about 2 requests per second. This is lamentably poor and even now I can't figure out how it's managing to spend so much time achieving not very much.

After a bit of experimentation I determined that if I use grails generate-all to put the scaffolding code in place in my classes (rather than using the dynamic scaffolding) then things speed up enormously. In fact I can now get about 200 requests per second. It's hard to see how there can be such a massive performance gulf between the two scenarios as I would have thought that the only extra overhead for dynamic scaffolding is the initial dynamic intercept of the missing action method and calling into the scaffolding code. Hopefully a Grails expert can explain this, or I will eventually figure it out myself. At least now I have determined that for real-world scenarios there isn't going to be a performance issue, though I am surprised that the Grails docs don't have a massive "Warning – dynamic scaffolding is really slow" box.

For now I haven't done much but read the docs and try a few things. I hope to get deeper into it soon.

I've been having a lot of trouble with my Ruby 1.9.1 install on Mac OS X. Mostly it works fine, but I struggle when installing gems that require native extensions. I think this is because the way my install was built causes linkage problems, perhaps due to 32 vs 64 bit issues, or due to linkage with other libraries. I'm not entirely sure what's causing the problems, but recently I decided enough was enough and tried out rvm since I've heard a lot of good things about it. I got the impression that by compiling from my own source I was stubbornly making a lot of my own trouble.

Rvm is trivial to install: it's a gem that installs some of its own executables. I did hack my PATH first, to remove /usr/local/bin (where my custom Ruby lived) so that I'd be using the stock Mac OS X Ruby for the rvm install.

> sudo gem install rvm
> rvm-install

Note that rvm-install added the following to the end of ~/.bash_profile automatically, so I could ignore the instruction it gave me about adding it myself:

if [ -s ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm ] ; then source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm ; fi

I then used rvm to install a fresh version of Ruby 1.9.1:
>> rvm install 1.9.1

Actually that failed with an error about libsqlite3.dylib being the wrong architecture – perhaps another hangover from my old manual installs, or a problem I'm going to have to solve sometime in the future! For now I moved the old version of that file and tried again:

> sudo mv /usr/local/lib/libsqlite3.dylib /usr/local/lib/libsqlite3.dylibOLD
> rvm install 1.9.1

And that left me with a decent ruby 1.9.1 install. Which brought me back to one of the things that I was originally frustrated by: getting NetBeans Ruby debugging working with the fast debugger. With my old install the ruby-debug-ide gem would not install, but I'm pleased to report that it does with this new setup.

However getting NetBeans to actually use my new rvm ruby required a bit of a trick. The Ruby Platform management GUI in NetBeans doesn't show you hidden folders in its file picker, so you can't navigate to the ~/.rvm/ruby-1.9.1-p243/bin/ruby file that it wants. The trick is to create a non-hidden symlink, so you can then find it from NetBeans (and it's also handy to get at your rvm files from Finder):

> ln -s ~/.rvm ~/rvm

One word of warning: once you're using an RVM Ruby install, do not use sudo for gem installs, as the gems (and every part of rvm) live in ~/.rvm so sudo is not required. In fact using sudo will knacker your gems quite badly as it gets its PATH wrong and its permissions and you end up deleting a bunch of stuff to get back to a known good state. I learnt this the hard way!

I was very excited to see MacRuby 0.5 beta 1 had been announced, complete with ahead of time compilation via LLVM. It has been long while since the previous update on the MacRuby blog in March, but clearly a lot of work has been taking place. At the moment this beta shows the promise of things to come but isn't yet fit for much more than anticipatory experimentation. If you want to try the macrubyc compiler, Antonio Cangiano's blog post on the topic is a must-read.

The MacRuby notes suggest that compiled ahead of time or not, it uses LLVM for a big speed win, but my own quick experiment showed the macruby interpreter to be about 3 times slower than the standard MRI Ruby 1.9.1. This was with a single small benchmark app only though, just to prove things were working, so I can't draw conclusions. I can't pretend I wasn't a little disappointed not to see MRI blown out of the water though, even though I know it's unscientific and wrong of me!

I couldn't get a fully compiled version to produce any output, though it appeared to run without barfing, so I couldn't tell if it was really working or not. It was notable that the compiled binary was nearly 15MB so there must be a lot of statically linked code being included to swell my couple of KB of Ruby code so much. I'm hopeful that this can be improved in the future in order to support my dream of iPhone apps being written with Ruby hooking into Cocoa. In fact more than a dream – I'm hopeful and optimistic that in the long-run Apple will make Ruby a heavily promoted first class citizen for Mac and iPhone development, sitting on top of Objective-C but hiding it for the most part. The whole world has moved on from primitive C-based languages to higher levels of abstraction and I think Apple really needs a successor to Objective-C within the next 5 years. Is MacRuby it?

I've been putting together a WordPress powered blog or two recently and diligently documenting the steps required, as ever. The documentation available from the WordPress site is pretty good, but sometimes it's over verbose, whilst frustratingly also stopping short of giving you exactly the details you need. So here's what works for me to upgrade an existing WordPress installation to a newer version. This is using the manual approach BTW rather than the built in auto-upgrade functionality, which asks for FTP details (of what I'm not sure, and it doesn't bother to elaborate) and therefore makes a mockery of the term 'auto'.

The official instructions that got me going initially are at http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress FWIW, but I do precisely this on Mac OS X:
  • Download the zipped upgrade package and unzip it somewhere - e.g. to wordpress_upgrade directory for the sake of this example.
  • Backup existing installation in full – both the wordpress directory itself and the associated MySQL DB, just in case.
  • Merge the newly downloaded package over your existing install (assumed to be a directory named wordpress here) with the following incantation at the command line, which takes advantage of the fact that cp merges, whereas Finder copying just oafishly replaces:
  • > cp -r  wordpress_upgrade/ wordpress_original
  • Compare the new wp-config-sample.php with your existing wp-config.php (e.g. using FileMerge) to see if any new config items have been added. If so, manually add those into your wp-config.php file, or if easier rename the sample to wp-config.php and put back the DB connection and other relevant bits.
  • Load up the /admin page in your web browser and follow the instructions to complete the upgrade, which involves it upgrading any DB bits, etc.

Say you've got a Ramaze web application quite happily running at http://foo.com/ but you want to have the whole app running at http://foo.com/myapp/. It's not unusual to want to do this, for various reasons, and it's relatively easy to arrange by setting a single piece of Ramaze config.

The exact way to do this depends on the version of Ramaze you're using, as the options system changed between the 2009.03 and 2009.04 gem versions. Here's the syntax for Ramaze version 2009.03 and previous:

Ramaze::Global.prefix = '/myapp'

And here's the syntax for Ramaze 2009.04 and later, which requires setting the prefix for links (as before) and a routing rule for stripping it off incoming requests (since it no longer does it automatically):

app_prefix = '/myapp'

Ramaze.options.prefix = app_prefix

Ramaze::Route[ /^#{app_prefix}(.*)$/ ] = '%s'

The prefix will be automatically added onto the front of all URLs created by Ramaze's built-in URL and link creator methods (R, Rs and A from the link helper). It will also be stripped off the front of all incoming requests by the dispatcher (for Ramaze 2009.03) or by the routing rule (for later versions). So your own application code doesn't need to be aware that it's running with a prefix at all, unless you create absolute URLs via means other than the link helper methods. In that case you will need to use Ramaze::Global.prefix or Ramaze.options.prefix in your own link construction code to get them right.

One thing which might catch you out is forgetting to put the forward slash on the front of the prefix. If you set the prefix to 'myapp' it won't work – it has to be '/myapp'.

Update: Note that static files (those in your public directory) are not affected by any of the above changes. Furthermore, chances are that you refer to them with absolute paths from your HTML anyway – e.g. for images, CSS, JavaScript. So further thought will be required to handle these.

Apple have finally patched up some serious security holes in their Java distributions with Mac OS X. I had a problem when trying to install it, getting the simple message The update "Java for OS X 10.5 Update 4" can't be installed almost immediately after pressing the Install button (it didn't even start downloading). I'd just freshly started up my Mac and the browser wasn't running (it specifically instructs you to quit all browsers) so that wasn't the problem.
JavaUpdate4Fail 
Repairing permissions on my startup disk with Disk Utility then restarting seemed to fix it and allow the installation to proceed. Now I have 1.6.0_13 successfully installed.

Update: Exactly the same experience on my PowerMac G5 (original attempt was on an Intel MacBook). Same problem, same solution. Could it be because I've previously used the Java Preferences app to switch between JVM versions (like you're supposed to)? It's just about conceivable that the way the prefs app performs the switching leaves permissions a bit messed up as far as the installer is concerned, but none of the permissions it claimed to have fixed looked to be related in any way. Maybe it was more the restart that helped. Certainly just fixing permissions alone was not enough.