Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Grails for creating quick mock applications



Currently I'm working on an Adobe Flex front-end which will communicate to Microsoft Team Foundation Server using some SOAP webservices.

As we are currently just concentrating on the Flex front-end, there are no TFS webservices available yet. This makes testing the Flex front-end somehow difficult. To make things easy we wanted to create some mock TFS webservices. This is when Grails comes is!

Within the hour we had the mock application running. Creating some basic domain classes, installing the xfire plugin and creating some services exposed as xfire webservices. And for verifying the data is stored correctly in the database we just used the generate-all command to create some basic CRUD views.

I know the Grails mock application will not see the production light, but creating quick mock applications for temporary usage is another thing in which Grails can be used very effectively.

2 comments:

Chrigel said...

funny coincidence: I wrote something about grails/flex/soap just an hour ago (http://n1ceone.blogspot.com), without having read your blog post before.

Feel free to bash on it, I am a flex/xfire n00b.

Marcel Overdijk said...

LOL ;-) I noticed your blog post as well about Flex, Grails and XFire. Funny.

If you want an exmaple on how to communicate directly from Flex to Grails services have a look at: http://marceloverdijk.blogspot.com/2008/01/blazeds-test-drive-sample-in-grails.html

I know the Grails Flex plugin has some rough edges, but it gives an impression what is possible using Grails plugins.


Cheers,
Marcel