2008-06-18

Beginning to understand WebFlow

I'm beginning to understand WebFlows. WebFlow is perhaps the most different part of working with Grails. You don't have to use WebFlows and in fact I think I'd advise people to avoid them until they are very comfortable in Grails. That's because the diagnosis of WebFlow is not as straight forward and intuitive as the rest of Grails. For most of Grails you just do things. With WebFlow you need to think things out.

I've developed an in-elegant technique for working with WebFlows that actually works well for me. I'll refine it a bit and write this up at some point. Hopefully some of the Grails rock-stars out there will help me get straight about it.

I'll be attending the NFJS conference in RTP this week and I plan on taking advantage of the free IntelliJ license. Maybe if I live with it for a while I'll get over myself and start getting productive. The problem is... I really am amazing with vi I've figured out how to use vi inside my current tool-chain and I'm actually quite effective at writing regex and macros in it for refactoring. I lose all that when I switch to a new tool kit so there is significant pain in adopting a new tool. Least of which is a price tag for something you don't know if you can adapt yourself to.

Now attending NFJS in RTP is what turned me on to Groovy and Grails. I happened to have been shopping around for platforms at the time so the timing couldn't have been better. Now I have Grails firmly in hand I'm interested in attending the development process improvement workshops so I can start working more effectively with the tools I currently have and potentially adding new support tools to my tool bag.