After starting up another Grails project and completely missing my text-to-speech solution for long build times, I decided to do something a little more re-usable.

I just released a Grails plugin that provides this functionality. It’s as simple as: 

grails install-plugin nadd-neutralizerRight now, only Mac OS X is supported. Patches are welcome for other operating systems. Source code is here: http://github.com/digerata/grails-nadd-neutralizer

Grails docs go a long way towards being the only materials you need to learn how to use Grails. Unfortunately, it can miss a few things that are common use cases.

In any real world production app, you don’t manage your configuration from within your WAR file. How do you have a configuration file deployed out to your production server beside your WAR file?

Most of the posts out there about external configuration all talk about hard coding external config locations into a variable like so:

grails.config.locations = [ "file:${userHome}/${appName}-conf.properties"]

Well, that sucks. That is assuming, again, more about production then you really can afford. The configuration of the production system, isn’t up to the developer. It’s up to the Release Manager or System Admin or a whole team of people besides you. Rather than force them into accommodating you, the programmer, you need to make it easy for them to specify WHATEVER THE FUCK THEY WANT.
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Whew, Grails has some gotchas. It is so great for so many reasons. But WOW! There are some time sinks tucked away for you to discover. In the hope of helping others, here is a list of the ones that hit me.
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I’m embarking, balls-out, on a new project using Grails. I’ll be leveraging a significant portion of our Java codebase and the fact that I can do that,is just plain stellar.

It quickly came time to test out some of the integration. The very first question was how to load resources for testing. E.g., I have a service that handles file uploads. How do I pass it a test file?

The documentation isn’t straightforward on this. In fact, I found the solution attached to a bug report for grails 1.1. It’s pretty simple, once you pull in the spring packages:

import org.springframework.core.io.ClassPathResource
import org.springframework.core.io.Resource

And then in your testXXX() function:

Resource resource = new ClassPathResource("resources/crying-baby.jpg")
def file = resource.getFile()
assert file.exists()

And you are good to go. Note the assert at the end to verify things are working.