I recently attended a presentation by Tim Berglund about Gaelyk at Uberconf. The technology of Gaelyk is pretty straightforward and doesn’t need much of an introduction, especially with the excellent tutorial available on its web site. Watching the presentation, I was struck by how little there is to Gaelyk and wondered why I was there. Sitting in a room of developers and coding a working, useful application in just over an hour, though, reminded me about how much fun web programming can be. Many of us have become so accustomed to frameworks like Struts, WebMVC, GWT and Grails that we’ve forgotten the simpler times, when you could slap together some Servlets and JSPs and have fun putting together a small, useful app. Gaelyk brings back those simpler times and makes them even more enjoyable by adding the conveniences of Groovy and App Engine.
I picked an app that I wanted to code, something that would tell Yammer users what their companies are talking about. It’s available for anyone to use at http://whatyammer.appspot.com.
Data access
Want to save a record to the database? Forget about messing around with bean and data access classes, database connections and ORM. No need to create tables. You’re coding for fun!
def user = new Entity('user')
user.email = params.email
user.name = params.name
user.phone = params.phone
user.save()That’s all. To get that record back out
datastore.execute {
select single from user
where email == params.email
}Forwarding objects to a view
Gaelyk views are coded in gtpl files, which are much like JSPs. The controller, echo.groovy
request.users = datastore.execute { select all from user where email == params.email }
forward 'showusers.gtpl'Adventure Time with <%= (request.users*.name).join(' and ') %>