Thank you for these links! I love programming history and the many things you can learn about your tools.
I am stuck on a few projects at work using Groovy/Grails. Groovy itself has been fine and I regularly switch between Groovy, Python and JavaScript with little more than a Google to double check syntax.
However dealing with Grails is a damn nightmare. I recently ran into a bug where grails parsed a parameter query variable containing a nbsp symbol. Instead of giving me a string with an nbsp character, it inserted an "A" with an accent mark in addition to the ndbsp character. Two for the price of one!
The best part was, this only happened after I compiled the app to a war file so it didn't show up in development.
This is the 3rd parsing bug in grails I have found in the last few months alone.
Another one was the when using "render as obj as JSON" shortcut for controllers. The parser was converting "</" characters into a single Unicode character. Causing the HTML string I was trying to render break. However doing the conversion to JSON manually in a service class and setting the right response headers then returning the JSON string worked fine.
The third one was XML builder. Errors are thrown if I have empty leaf nodes (at a minimum I need to add {} to the end of leaf nodes). Only works in dev however as gain when I build the war it does not work at all. Instead I just build my XML string manually.
The final thing I don't care for is the GORM. We have never gotten DB auto reconnect to work with any MSSQL server or DB2 in the last 2 years (that we have been actively trying to get it to work) across 4+ applications.
I am stuck on a few projects at work using Groovy/Grails. Groovy itself has been fine and I regularly switch between Groovy, Python and JavaScript with little more than a Google to double check syntax.
However dealing with Grails is a damn nightmare. I recently ran into a bug where grails parsed a parameter query variable containing a nbsp symbol. Instead of giving me a string with an nbsp character, it inserted an "A" with an accent mark in addition to the ndbsp character. Two for the price of one!
The best part was, this only happened after I compiled the app to a war file so it didn't show up in development.
This is the 3rd parsing bug in grails I have found in the last few months alone.
Another one was the when using "render as obj as JSON" shortcut for controllers. The parser was converting "</" characters into a single Unicode character. Causing the HTML string I was trying to render break. However doing the conversion to JSON manually in a service class and setting the right response headers then returning the JSON string worked fine.
The third one was XML builder. Errors are thrown if I have empty leaf nodes (at a minimum I need to add {} to the end of leaf nodes). Only works in dev however as gain when I build the war it does not work at all. Instead I just build my XML string manually.
The final thing I don't care for is the GORM. We have never gotten DB auto reconnect to work with any MSSQL server or DB2 in the last 2 years (that we have been actively trying to get it to work) across 4+ applications.
tl;dr
Groovy is OK but Grails is a total PITA.