Catch my #Grails talk @springone2gx!

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

August 21, 2013

I’m speaking at SpringOne 2GX next month. I invite you to come see my presentation: “Case Study – Grails in the Real World“.

I have been working hard for some time on other material that will be presented at SpringOne. With that stuff briefly off my plate, I have dove head first into getting my presentation ready! There isn’t a lot of time. I got a hold of the template for our slides and have been writing raw material, slowly trying to morph it into a top notch presentation.

What are you talking about?

Most of my presentation is aimed at showing off a Grails app I built about several months ago. The app’s purpose is to serve up maven artifacts for our commercial tc Server product. The latest version of tc Server now has the embedded Tomcat feature, and to use it, many developers are interested in simply adding a maven dependency to their project.

We essentially wanted to provide this feature free to developers, but still track download statistics. So I set out writing a Grails app that allowed you to register by email address and then give you the settings to plugin into your maven build file. It works great! The Grails app is essentially a proxy server. It pulls down the files from our super secret location, and forwards them to the requester.

Growing pains

I went through a lot of growing pains making it all work. You register online with an email address. The app sends you an email with a hashed activation code. You have seven days to activate or the link is thrown out.

At one time, we generated a random hash link that you can see after account activation. Later on, that was replaced with an authenticated REST endpoint with extra steps to configure that for maven.

The whole time, I wanted to share this with other developers that might be going through some of the same pains as me in making it functional, durable, easy-to-use, and able to withstand a barrage of customer-driven mistakes (which always happen!) It was also reminiscent of work at my previous job where I built a 24×7 Ops center that managed a nationwide network. My team ran into a whole host of technical and customer issues, and I’d like to think that my experience there helped shape things on this Grails app.

If you come to my talk, you will get to walk through these various bits of the app and hopefully learn some tactics to help your own development efforts. Given that the production app contains secret email passwords and other proprietary information, I had to make a sanitized version of the app. That is mostly done with just one thing remaining. Hopefully, it won’t take too much work to orchestrate the presentation.

Even if you don’t catch my presentation, I strongly encourage you to sign up for SpringOne 2GX. This is one of the best conferences out there, with some of the best people in the industry coming to speak from around the world.

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