Over the past few weeks. I've been working on and off at creating a fully functional CMS Engine for Grails. A few things have come into play that I could find little documentation on and would like to mention for those that may not know about them.

In this particular use case. I need to be able to reference all layout views within a project in both development mode as well as warDeployed. This can seem confusing because in war mode your GSP files are compiled. However, a non compiled...

War building in Grails can be a time consuming process. With the addition of the asset-pipeline it can grow longer. This, however, is better than the alternative of slowing down your app startup time. Lets talk about what the asset-pipeline does during this war compiling phase.

First the build scans your current app, and all installed olugins for assets to compile. For plugins this includes the 'web-app' folder in order to facilitate easier migration. Then, the asset-pipeline scans for...

Rails and Grails are both great, powerful frameworks with many core similarities and differing approaches. They both share a strong preference to convention over configuration and they both follow the MVC style of frameworks (though Grails adds a new concept called services we will go into later. I have had the pleasure of working heavily with both frameworks and learning about their various quirks. This is coming from the perspective of a formerly full time rails developer and the transition...