Kirkman Enterprises

 I've been posting off and on about the website I have been developing using the Groovy on Grails Framework.  Friday afternoon, I walked out of my office at school with a smile on my face.  I had just sent an e-mail to the professor I work for and our business partner telling them that I had put an early version of the site on our research group's web server.  I've come to like developing in Grails.  One of the requirements of the web development framework for me was integration with pre-existing Java code.  The site is intended to be a web-based service for the research I have been doing at school.  That research has resulted in an existing code base in Java which I wanted to use with the website.  Grails allowed me to simply copy the Java code into the Grails project and have it work.  That is a big plus for me.

I've worked on a number of different websites over the year from "simple" blogs like this one, to departmental websites with lots of pages to maintain and a PHP based back-end, to a HTML only newsletter back in the late 1990s.  Developing this web application has been more extensive than any of those sites, perhaps more than all of them combined.  As a result, it has been incredibly enjoyable for me.  This site I have been developing has required me to involve many different aspects of web programming and learn about different technologies: Grails, Groovy, Java, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JQuery, deployment to an Apache Web server and Tomcat server.  

As I move forward I have a few things to clean up on the early version of the website.  Then I'll start working on the next set of features to implement before the end of June when we are wanting to release the alpha version of the site.  There have been a number of hiccups along the way, problems to research and solve.  So I can't claim the development has been flawless.  I doubt development of any application, particularly when you are learning new programming techniques and technologies, will be flawless.  In a way I wish I could remember the various problems I had and how I solved them so that I could provide a resource of solutions.  

If anyone has any problems they have experienced and want to ask if I have any ideas they are welcome to.