Rails, Grails and Curl

After looking at the embedded comments used by RIFE it seemed time to revisit Ruby on Rails. While looking at an example in the PragProg 2nd Ed. I was struck that what I was looking at would be easier in Curl.

Curl has both anonymous procedures and macros so stands as a strong functional language in any comparison to JavaScript, JRuby or Groovy. Smalltalk has blocks.

But instead of getting this blog note written, I have been messing about with CLISP and the question of just what macros offer. Well, in Smalltalk they would offer operators with more than 2 characters so we could have <=> instead of just <= or => and such. Or ;-)

But I only wanted to show how a few macros can make a Curl web page so nice and clean and readable compared to the latest thing on rails. A sort of pirouette of Curl. But things got macro out of control ...

And Controllers? Well, in Curl they help with animation or represent devices that have rotations, such as joysticks. Oh - Curl comes with a Quaternion class for rotations in 3D.

So when is a web content language out of control? When its comments are used to control its content? (those aren't comments; those are annotations - this a concordance, not a document ...)

Everything we were taught about separation of presentation from X is wrong when it comes to a rich web GUI. And an object is not a row in a relational database (there, I dared to say it ..)

In the early days of television they did not know what to call those who were watching the action as it happened on those funny tubes in restautants and bars. They became 'viewers' but we talk of 'watching TV'. The View in MVC is a bit like that: we pull back the 'model' a ways and achieve some degree of decoupling from any data store. But a 'personalized and dynamic view' is not the 'view' of early MVC. It likely required something like viewer-specific persistent data. Make that a 'personalized and dynamic view of a collaborative process or activity with published tasks' and the closest thing that I know today is Croquet.

GRAILS and Groovy tip

If you try out groovy Grails on Windows as an open-source web application framework, I suggest you install it as a sub-directory of your Groovy directory.
You will want to knwo that your groovy is running fine: in my case I added

set CLASSPATH=I:\groovy-1.0\groovy-1.0.jar;%CLASSPATH%

to my groovy-1.0\bin\groovyConsole.bat I also have three ENV variables defined: GROOVY_HOME, GROOVY_JAR and GRAILS_HOME and both HOME var's are in my path with \bin appended to them.

With that done, you can go into the Grails bin and edit the

grails.bat

I think that there is no point avoiding at least this much:

set CLASSPATH=

because even with my own classpath tool it is just too much grief. Grails does not need your classpath but having one is a problem. The top of my grails.bat now reads

REM set groovy_home=I:\groovy-1.0
REM set GRAILS_HOME=%GROOVY_HOME%\grails-0.5.6
REM set path=%groovy_home%\bin;%grails_home%\bin;%PATH%
REM set GROOVY_JAR=groovy-1.0.jar
set classpath=

To test that things are running start in the grails\bin with

grails help

which should run error-free and list the grails commands. From there you should be OK following the Grails Quick Start steps. Until help comes up error-free, you have an issue.

One last tip: Grails will create your web app root directory in the directory you are in at the time you execute

grails create-app

which in my case is running

I:\groovy-1.0\grails-0.5.6\scripts\CreateApp.groovy

so you do not want to be in .\grails\bin on your command line. If you have not installed the Microsoft Power Toy Open Command Window which launches CMD.exe from any folder in the file explorer, you will want to do so ... whether you are using Grails or Rails without an IDE.