My favorite Grails Plugins

One of the most powerful features of Grails is their plugin system. Using a simple command "grails install-plugin" you can increase the functionality of your application. Sweetness! The core Grails developers didn't think lightly on plugins, they have a great API to use when you want to write your own plugin.

Here are some of the plugins that I will be using on Siteproducer:

1. Acegi - The Acegi security system is a very comprehensive security system, but sometimes it requires too much configuration.   Following the Grails paradigm "convention over configuration" the Acgei plugin will setup Acegi with very little effort on your part.   The plugin gives you:  login controller, logout controller, registration controller, and crud pages to manage protected resources.  You will be up and running with a secure Grails application in about 5 minutes.

2.  Acts As Taggable - Tagging is all the rage these days and the acts as taggable brings tagging to your domain objects.   The plugin is super simple to use, just add "implements Taggable" to your domain objects and that's it.   Acts As Taggable exposes methods to add tags, delete tags, and list tags on your domain object.

3.  Quartz - Quartz the practically standard mechanism for performing scheduled tasks has made its way to a Grails plugin (it use to be part of Grails core).  Once you have the plugin installed you can easily do scheduled tasks like this:

class FirstJob {
def cronExpression = "0 0 0 ? * *" //midnight, every day

def execute() {
log.info("firstjob executed")
}
}

4.  Searchable - The searchable plugin is a huge time saver!  Searchable adds full-text searching of your domain objects via Lucene and Compass.   One nice thing about the plugin is that you don't have to know a lick about Lucene or Compass and still get all the benefits.   The plugin also supports relationships between your domain objects.  To get your started there is even a bundled search controller so you can verify that when you save your domain objects they are being properly indexed.

5.  WebTest - Unit and Integration testing is great.  But how about testing from end-to-end from the end-users perspective?   WebTest is a great functional testing tool and the Grails plugin for WebTest makes it super simple to create and execute your functional tests.

There are alot more plugins available for your Grails applications.   Feel free to take a look at them at grails.org/plugins.