Groovy Google AppEngine – Looking towards the GRAILS

• google
• groovy
• hosting

Recently I logged into the Google AppEngine dashboard, and was pleased to be greeted with the option to take an “early look” at their Java support. Nice, I thought. Java on AppEngine – that’ll be pretty handy. Didn’t think too much more about it. Then today in my normal web reading time I came across a post on SpringSource about How to write your Google AppEngine applications in Groovy. Now *this* was interesting. Groovy is a language that has caught my attention on more than one occasion, and has actually proved pretty useful for writing small utility applications.

Using Groovy for Web Application Development
Groovy is well suited to the domain of the web programmer. Being fairly impatient types, who would like to produce applications quickly and would rather not write more code than we have to, Groovy is an absolute diamond in the J2EE coal mine. Groovy offers groovlets in the place of servlets, which essentially do the same thing; but some of the syntactic sugar offered with groovy builders make generating HTML pretty simple.

The quest for Grails
As it stands, groovy is pretty useful for building simple scripts, but of course it’s not going to compete with the popular frameworks out there at the moment. Well along comes Grails. I came across Grails a little while ago, but have to admit passed it off as “just another Ruby on Rails clone”, and without being too harsh, it more or less is (with some minor differences). Without having committed myself one way or the other (a bit of a jack of all trades and master of none, perhaps) I could have gone for either RAILS or Grails without caring too much.

The potential (and likelihood according to SpringSource) that GAE will eventually work with Grails applications, really tips the balance for me. GAE hosting is probably some of the most economical and easy to manage scalable hosting environments currently available. With a framework as powerful as Grails deployed on it, I would expect more developers showing an interest in, and migrating to both Grails and Groovy. This in turn, would probably encourage more developers to use AppEngine to deploy their applications.

A note about CRON
Additionally, I noticed today that there is a menu item for Cron Jobs now in the AppEngine management interface. Anyone know when that popped in there? Was it at the same time that they implemented the Java support? At any rate, I’m pretty excited about it – previously I was thinking I would have to run an EC2 instance or something to handle background tasks required by my web applications. Now I don’t think I will have to