Usage

$ ./setGrailsVersion 1.3.2
$ grails
Welcome to Grails 1.3.2 - http://grails.org/
Licensed under Apache Standard License 2.0
.......

$ ./setGrailsVersion 1.2.2
$ grails
Welcome to Grails 1.2.2 - http://grails.org/
Licensed under Apache Standard License 2.0
.......

Prerequisites:

• Unzip your versions of grails side-by-side in a known directory. I use ~/grailsBase, so a valid install would be ~/grailsBase/grails-1.3.2
• Leave your GRAILS_HOME environment variable set to ~/grailsBase/grails
• Leave your PATH environment variable with an entry to ~/grailsBase/grails/bin
• Save this script along side your installs. For me, this means I save it at ~/grailsBase/setGrailsVersion.sh

Script:

#!/bin/sh

##
## Switches grails versions by changing the the symlink ~/grails to a
## ~/grails-$VERSION
##
## Author: Dan Lynn (dan@danlynn.com)
##

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
	cat <<End-of-message
Usage:
	$0 [version]

The version argument must be a valid grails installation and comes in the standard grails versioning scheme.

Examples:
	$0 1.3.2
	$0 1.2.2

End-of-message

	exit 1
fi

DIRNAME=`dirname "$0"`
NEW_GRAILS_HOME="$DIRNAME/grails-$1"

if [ ! -d $NEW_GRAILS_HOME ]; then
	echo "$NEW_GRAILS_HOME doesn't exist!" >&2
	exit 1
fi

rm "$DIRNAME/grails"
ln -s $NEW_GRAILS_HOME "$DIRNAME/grails"

I’ve been using Burt Beckwith’s UI Performance plugin for Grails to bundle and compress my static content (images, js, css) during the build, so I can save on outbound bandwith and improve the response time of my application. In order to take advantage of this build-time optimization, we need to modify the Apache configuration to serve static content instead of proxying those requests to the container.

1. $ grails install-plugin ui-performance
2. Configure your app to use the plugin’s taglibs and to bundle resources if necessary. (See http://www.grails.org/plugin/ui-performance)
3. Add a handler for the CreateWarEnd event in your scripts/Events.groovy file (make one if you don’t have one). This handler will package all the bundled and gzipped resources into a static zip file that you can upload to Cloud Foundry:

   eventCreateWarEnd = {warName, stagingDir ->
       def directory = new File(warName).parent
   
       ant.zip(destfile:"${directory}/static.zip") {
           fileset(dir:"${stagingDir}") {
               include name: "images/**"
               include name: "css/**"
               include name: "js/**"
           }
       }
   }
   

4. Create a “container initialization script” for Cloud Foundry to execute when your instance starts up. This script will tell Apache to directly serve the following directories and to add the appropriate Content-Encoding header for content that is already gzipped. The name doesn’t really matter at this point, but I called mine proxyexcludes.sh.

   cat > /etc/httpd/conf.d/_proxyexcludes.conf <<END
   ProxyPass /images !
   ProxyPass /css !
   ProxyPass /js !
   
   SetEnvIf Request_URI "\\.gz\\.(css|js|jpg|gif|png|ico)\$" already_compressed=true
   Header set Content-Encoding gzip env=already_compressed
   END
   

   I found that keeping this file up to date was easier if I just let grails rebuild it every time after the WAR is created. I modified my eventCreateWarEnd handler to take care of this for me:

   eventCreateWarEnd = {warName, stagingDir ->
       def directory = new File(warName).parent
   
       ant.zip(destfile:"${directory}/static.zip") {
           fileset(dir:"${stagingDir}") {
               include name: "images/**"
               include name: "css/**"
               include name: "js/**"
           }
       }
   
       ant.echo "Creating Proxy exclusion list: ${directory}/proxyexcludes.sh"
       new File("${directory}/proxyexcludes.sh") << """cat > /etc/httpd/conf.d/_proxyexcludes.conf <<END
   ProxyPass /images !
   ProxyPass /css !
   ProxyPass /js !
   
   SetEnvIf Request_URI "\\.gz\\.(css|js|jpg|gif|png|ico)\$" already_compressed=true
   Header set Content-Encoding gzip env=already_compressed
   END
   """
   
   }
   

5. $ grails war
6. Upload the static.zip file produced during the build as “static content” when you upload your app to Cloud Foundry:
   

   Cloud Foundry Upload Static Content

7. When creating a deployment, upload your “proxyexcludes.sh” container initialization script:
   

   Cloud Foundry Deployment

8. Fire up your instance and check out the performance gains!

Here is their javascript password validator:

if( (/\W/).test(document.passwdForm.pin1.value) || (document.passwdForm.pin1.value.length < 6) || (document.passwdForm.pin1.value.length > 8 ) )
{
    alert("Your password does not conform to the Password Policy. Please try again.");
    document.passwdForm.pin1.focus();
    return false;
}

For a feature that supposedly exists to protect my money on the web, this is just pathetic. ]]> http://danlynn.com/general/verified-by-visas-insecure-password-requirements/feed/ 0 http://danlynn.com/photography/no-leonids-for-littleton/ http://danlynn.com/photography/no-leonids-for-littleton/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:55:57 +0000 Dan http://danlynn.com/?p=54 Not wanting to drive outside of the city at 2 AM, I figured I’d try to catch one or two meteors from The Leonids from my backyard. Sadly, all I got was a pretty indigo sky and some nice looking stars. Until next time…

No Leonids for Littleton

After creating a Hibernate userType to handle the serialization/deserialization, I ran into a ClassNotFoundException when attempting to deserialize my object.  I found out that this is due to java using the “last defined ClassLoader” when deserializing with an ObjectInputStream, which might not be the right ClassLoader in a Groovy environment (see: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-1627.

The solution? Subclass ObjectInputStream to allow you to pass in a predefined ClassLoader and override the resolveClass(ObjectStream classDesc) to use this ClassLoader parameter:

public class ClassLoaderAwareObjectInputStream extends ObjectInputStream {

 private ClassLoader myClassLoader;

 public ClassLoaderAwareObjectInputStream(ClassLoader myClassLoader) throws IOException, SecurityException {
 super();
 this.myClassLoader = myClassLoader;
 }

 public ClassLoaderAwareObjectInputStream(InputStream in, ClassLoader myClassLoader) throws IOException {
 super(in);
 this.myClassLoader = myClassLoader;
 }

 @Override
 protected Class resolveClass(ObjectStreamClass desc) throws IOException,
 ClassNotFoundException {
 String name = desc.getName();
 return Class.forName(name, false, myClassLoader);
 }
}

Thanks to Satish Gunnu for the tip.

Automatic Updates automatically restarts your computer for you

class Person {
    String name
    String uniqueIdentifier

    transient beforeInsert = {
        uniqueIdentifier = java.util.UUID.randomUUID().toString()
    }
}

This works great, but if you’re like me, in that you like to work with test data while developing, you probably have some code in your BootStrap.groovy file that no longer works. The problem is that GORM’s validate() method does not call event hooks, and that property we just added is not nullable. One small change and we’re back in business:

class Person {
    String name
    String uniqueIdentifier

    stating constraints = {
        uniqueIdentifier(nullable:true)
    }

    transient beforeInsert = {
        uniqueIdentifier = java.util.UUID.randomUUID().toString()
    }
}

Cutting those seven minutes out of the feedback loop may not seem like much, but when you consider that we average about 20 builds per day that’s significant savings, even if there were only one developer waiting on the build results each time. Next up: database versioning using liquibase.