Grails From the Crypt: WebFlows

Some may argue, but as a practical matter, Tesler's Law of Conservation of Complexity is ironclad. Essential software complexity can neither be created or destroyed -- it can only be hidden.

Grails does a good job of hiding the complexity of Java web-application programming, but it has to rely on some fairly elaborate mechanisms to do this. And, like any other lie, abstraction becomes more likely to unravel as it gets more complex. As The Bard tells us:

Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man's son may, but in the end truth will out.
[1596 Shakespeare Merchant of Venice ii. ii. 73]

A first encounter with the serialization requirement for objects in Grails webflow is like being a newlywed who has just unearthed a human femur while working in the garden. You have a choice. You can dig further to reveal the gruesome truth. Or you can shovel it over and try to set aside the possibility that your new beloved is an axe-murderer.

Grails in the Cloud: The Democratization of SaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS) is an increasingly common delivery model for horizontal-market business applications such as CRM and HR, particularly at the enterprise scale. SaaS has compelling advantages for small-scale vertical-market applications as well. However, applications for these markets tend to be authored by a domain expert working alone or as part of a small start-up. The development complexity and run-time infrastructure costs associated with web application technologies are a significant barrier to these developers. That's why most software solutions for this market tend to be stand-alone applications written using productive, but fundamentally unscalable development platforms.