The sorry state of Grails (Plugins)

We have been developing and maintaining a complex web application on Grails since summer of 2008. By then Grails had passed the 1.0 release milestone and was really hot. A good 10 years later the application is still in use and we are trying to upgrade from Grails 2.4 to 3.3.

Upgrading Grails – a rough ride

Similar topast upgrade experiences the ride is not very smooth. Besides the major changes like the much welcomed switch to the gradle build system , interceptors instead of filters and streamlined configuration there are again a host of more subtle changes. The biggest problem for us though is the plugin situation.

It’s the plugins

In the past we had tough breaks like the abandoned selenium plugin in favor of the much better geb for functional testing. That had cost us a lot of work and many lost and not yet rewritten functional tests.

This time it seems especially hard because you two of our central plugins are not readily available anymore:

1. Apache Shiro Plugin
2. Compass-based Searchable Plugin

1. Shiro authentication

There still is no official release of the shiro plugin for Grails 3.x. After some searching and researching the initial port on github we decided to fork and maintain the most current forked version ourselves and try to work with it. Fortunately it was relatively easy to integrate and to update some dependencies. Our authentication and authorization works at least as good as before and we do not face additional problems. Working with interceptors feels quite good, too.

2. Search

The situation is harder with search. Compass and the searchable plugin are dead – plain and simple. The replacement for grails is the elasticsearch plugin which mostly adopted the API of the searchable plugin. Getting it to work is not that easy though. You have different versions depending on the grails 3 version you are targetting. Each plugin version targets a specific elasticsearch server version and so on. Often times (like in the default configuration) you will need a matching mapper-attachment plugin that is not available on maven in newer versions. This is mentioned somewhere in the midst of the plugin documentation.

Furthermore the plugin itself has some problems with hibernate proxies and concurrency so here we have to mess around with the plugin code once more. Once we have everything working for us like before we will try to get our patches upstream.

Marching forward

The upgrade from 2.x to 3.x is the biggest (and best) step of Grails into the right direction. On the downside it places a lot of burden on the application and plugin developers. That again increases the cost of maintaining proven applications further.

Right now we are close to a Grails 3.3 version of our application but have invested considerable effort into this upgrade.

Our current recommendation and practice is to not start new web applications based on the grails framework because there have been too many breaking changes and the maintainance cost is high. But we are keeping a close look at grails because the increased modularization and and new options like the grails-react-profile may keep grails interesting in the future.