{"id":238,"date":"2011-01-08T08:53:40","date_gmt":"2011-01-08T15:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journeyman.ivystreetinc.com\/?p=238"},"modified":"2011-01-08T08:59:51","modified_gmt":"2011-01-08T15:59:51","slug":"grails-app-on-google-app-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/?p=238","title":{"rendered":"Grails App On Google App Engine"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wanted to collect things I know about the health care process into an application and decided a Grails app running on Google App Engine would be a fun way to go.\u00a0 This is how I got things launched, and you might be able to use this for your app.<\/p>\n

The reason I chose the Google platform was cost.\u00a0\u00a0 The idea of an Amazon EC2 environment and platform as a service really appeals to me, and in fact this site is served up from a PHP\/Servlet container Linux server I rent on my ISP provider.\u00a0 But a lot of the providers cost quite a bit more than I want to spend now to play with concepts.\u00a0 Google is a bit quirky but I think in the future the cloud platforms will be much more standard and accommodating to widespread tech and code — seems to be where Amazon, Salesforce, VMWare etc. are all heading.\u00a0 Some of us will write the code that binds it — just like no one worries about connection pooling anymore, a lot of the stuff will become transparent and we can just code<\/em>.\u00a0 Not today though.<\/p>\n

And a lot of times, I don’t want to be a programmer per se, instead, I just want to do make my idea real.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am hoping the Google platform can help me do this quickly.<\/p>\n

Before you start, you’ll have to get a Google app engine account using your cell phone because they will SMS text a confirmation number to you.\u00a0 I wasn’t confortable doing this, so at Walmart I picked up a TracFone pay as you go for $10, and it had 20 total minutes that came free with it.\u00a0\u00a0 I priced out other could platforms and you have to really pay big (Although now Amazon has a year of free services for new people on a small scale).\u00a0 $10 for my piece of mind seems reasonable.\u00a0 Also — a cool phone for $10 is quite amazing, I was shocked.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ll probably write an article up on the Ivy Street Design site about it.\u00a0 But Onto Business.<\/p>\n

How to get a Grails App Up onto Google Apps, in Meta terms.\u00a0\u00a0 I am assuming the person reading this is already a Grails developer familiar with fundamental actions.<\/p>\n

Setup<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Get a Google App Engine account.<\/li>\n
  2. Choose a name for your app and set up an application space in it.\u00a0 It will end up being something like “<yourapp>.appspot.com” for the url, since appspot serves them up at Google.<\/li>\n
  3. OK — you should have your IDE and machine set up for Grails.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m not going through it so make sure GRAILS_HOME and GROOVY_HOME environment is set up in your environment (with the \/bin’s in the PATH, just like the JAVA setup you should have done).<\/li>\n
  4. Download the Google Apps SDK for Java on their site.\u00a0 Unzip it to your library spot then, set up the APPENGINE_HOME env variable and add the \/bin to the PATH variable.<\/li>\n
  5. Test your setup quick.\u00a0 Open a terminal up and type in and test each of:\n