Love Grails? Give something back to the community

Hi All

Been thinking today how important it to the success of the Grails eco system that people give back as much as they take. Grails is simply a revolutionary full stack web development framework. It personally saves me so much development time that it is simply my only choice for web development now.

Anyway I have been using Grails on and off for about 2-3 years. I think is started dabbling with it from version 0.3 but have seen it grow from strength to strength upto its current release of 1.1.1.

The projects I built in grails were most beta ideas and most never seen light of day. They are in my great ideas hardrive graveyard. Anyway one of them has finally seen the light of day: www.ebookstamper.com

Throughout the development of this site I came accross a few missing features in grails that I would only have found from building a commercial website. So I decide to build these features myself in the form of a plugin. I have to tell you it one the best decicions i made.

Grails makes it so easy to create a new plugin and release it that it seem criminal not to. Anyone can apply for a grails plugin developer account and Graeme will probably grant it in 5 mins from his iphone. Then you can check in your work and hey presto you can call yourself a grails plugin developer.

So what can a plugin be. Well anything really. Have you written some code in your Grails app that you think can be made more general. Well do it and refactor it out it into a plugin.

Here are some good ideas for plugins:

Wrap an existing java library as a grails plugin.
There are so many great java libs out there that do specific cool things. Make them available in grails as a plugin. Some good examples of this already are the amazon s3 plugin or the awesome searchable plugin or even the quartz plugin.

Wrap an existing javascript library
This the same as the java lib example above. There are some many javascript utils out there. If you use one think about making it into a plugin for grails. I did this with the super file upload plugin i wrote. I also see it with the grails ui plugin.

Wrap up a handler for new protocol
Have you had to write your own protocol handler for your grails app release it as a plugin. New xml protocols come out all the time.

Wrap up some cool algorithim you have written
So you have written some code that does something cool. If you think it can be useful to someone else then release it as a plugin.

Create a taglib library
Have you written some cool tag libs that you use again and again. Why not package them up as a plugin. I have done this with my paypal pro plugin. You can use the tag libs to create credit card fields such as country select box, credit card type select box, and expriy date etc


Finally rememeber, this all about Karma. If you give good things wil always happen in some shape or form.

So start today: See what code you can give back to your Grails Communtity :)

Peace