There are a few things I like about how the Grails project manages it documentation. Firstly their website Grails.org has an own edit (Wiki) style. Meaning that pages regarding the many tutorials, plugins, new features can be updated by the community. This open style means that the project leads have more time to focus on more complex tasks.

Secondly I really like the Sun javadoc style Grails Framework Reference Documentation which are now being produced. The documentation includes descriptions and examples of the various aspects of the Grails framework.

Lastly, if any of the documentation is out of date for any reason, the community is invited to report problems to the project’s issue tracker to be recorded. Other members of the community can then look into any alterations which need to be made.

To start with I picked an improvement classed as ‘Trivial’ which I thought just about matched my level of Grails source code knowledge.

GRAILS-564 - “Have scaffolding display friendly names instead of camel case class names”

With my own use of Grails I’d seen that class properties were now being displayed with ‘friendly names’.

For example a domain class such as:

The property LotsOfWords is defaultly displayed in the scaffolding as “Lots Of Words”, however the class name was still being displayed as the short code “ManyWords” instead of “Many Words”.

So to the fix.

I traced the scaffolding creation to the class DefaultGrailsTemplateGenerator. This class is responsible for the creation of the default scaffolding views and controllers. Its in this class where a map of values is passed to the templates in “src/grails/templates/scaffolding/” when you call a command like “grails generate-all <classname>”. Here is where I was going to make my change.

I passed in a new property naturalClassName, to the view templates and replaced it with the
previous place holder where it was appropriate. The natural name is created using the method:

So I’ve now decided to get involved in any way in can, and I’m giving myself a year to do it. I’ve picked a couple of Java projects which I really enjoy using as my starting spot.

Groovy + Grails

Spring Framework

As a side note, if anyone else wants to join me and get involved at the same time, drop me an email.

Ars Technica has a great review of the text book being put forward by the ID movement. They find it to be without evidence or basic logically arguments.

It soon became apparent that to host my own Java applications and web sites I needed a new host. Fasthost.com is not a good organisation and I really wanted to cut all links with them. This was all the encouragement I needed to move to my own dedicated server.

I choose to jump into bed with a local (York) company called Bytemark.

A dedicated host gave me the chance to make my own decisions, my choice of web server and its configuation. Also the ability to run my own increasingly demanding Java applications since I had my own deadicated ram to play with.

However this came with the downside that I had to manage said server. I have basic knowledge of HP-UX and bits and pieces from various Linux distros. But I’ve always liked a challenge and I look forward to running the show for a change.

For the nosey people, I’ve got 2GB of Ram, mirrored hard drives running Debian Etch. I’m planning on installing Apache, php, mysql for various WordPress sites I run and Tomcat for Java.

Apologies if you are reading this after being redirected from missing content.

My previous content management system was just getting me down and not up to the job. I’ll may move some of the content over in time, meanwhile if you need to know anything specific contact me on mark at sailes dot co dot uk.

Regretfully

Mark,