Tomorrow the fun really begins, it'll be Day 0.
For this project I was going to teach myself Grails, which is a web framework that focuses on convention over configuration, and I still might, but I decided that I wanted to use something that has a little more community support, so I’m going with Spring MVC instead. (I’ve included a pic down below that shows there’s almost double the web resources for Spring MVC versus Grails. Both are java based, which is grand, because I’ve been using java for every role I’ve had since finishing school. Another benefit of Spring MVC is that it’s a recognized enterprise solution, Grails, while fun and entirely serviceable, doesn’t look quite as good on a resume.
Some people are against the idea of buying physical books to learn how to code, I totally understand this mindset, I buy books to only watch them obsolete a few weeks or months after getting them. That’s the unfortunate nature of software development, especially if you’re using anything open source. But as indicated, I am a book guy, I like to have pages in front of me that I can mark up, carry in a back pack, and physically book mark. Don’t get me wrong, I still go to the web for references, but a book lets me not rely on a connection for a while, it makes me feel like the era before ubiquitous information, I kind of like that once in a while. So the book I bought is Developing Enterprise Applications with Spring: An End-to-End Approach, it’s highly rated and contains call outs to the specific features I’ll be developing.
The funny thing about it is that I’m going to be developing a fully functioning RESTful web app solely to server as a back end for native mobile apps.
Another thing that just dawned on me regarding the reason I’m going with Spring over Grails: I already designed the data model. Spring allows you to build an application over an existing database/data model; but Grails, playing to its strengths, uses a top down representation of its domain objects, the database is dictated by the application as it’s built. I love databases and queries and I want a little more control over everything, I think Spring’s going to provide that.
I’ll probably update tomorrow night with progress, but I’ve got a cool dinner thing tonight and a beer fest tomorrow, so who knows.
Oh, here’s that picture:
