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Grails on Google App Engine – Part 1: A Case Study

Soon after Google had announced App Engine for Java I started to play around with the platform. Despite the limitations that App Engine imposes on developers I really wanted to know what all the buzz is about. Not only did I want to deploy a useful, non-trivial application I also wanted to get a feel for App Engine’s production readiness. Most of today’s developers are embracing (web) frameworks that help them to focus on implementing business logic. This might become an issue with App Engine for multiple reasons. Adding Megabytes of JAR files to your application increases the cold start up time. Furthermore, App Engine restricts the usage of certain specifications, technologies and frameworks. Over the past two years I became a big fan of Groovy and Grails. Therefore, I wanted to leverage the ease of use of Grails to implement a solution on App Engine. All I needed to get started was the Grails App Engine plugin. Even though I read about Gaelyk I wasn’t fully convinced that it would be able to provide me with all the functionality I needed to implement my application e.g. no support for taglibs or Sitemesh.

To limit the amount of work I’d have to put into this experiment I chose to implement a online bookmark manager with limited functionality. The features I wanted to cover should also take advantage of some of the services provided by App Engine. My plan was to use the Mail service and the URL Fetch API to get a feel on how easy it is to use them.

• User registration and confirmation via email
• User authenication
• Management of bookmarks in folders per user
• Tagging of bookmarks
• Marking bookmarks as favorites
• Automatic retrieval of URL meta data
• Export of bookmarks as XML and HTML

The final result became Favalike which uses Grails 1.3.1 and the App Engine plugin 0.8.10. The following postings will describe my experience and the challenges I had to face in detail.

More on this topic:

• Grails on Google App Engine – Part 2: Project Setup
• Grails on Google App Engine – Part 3: Persistence
• Grails on Google App Engine – Part 4: Third-Party Libraries
• Grails on Google App Engine – Part 5: Conclusion