I’m investigating Grails vs. other Agile web frameworks, and one key use case I’m trying to support is the ability to modify controllers and install plugins post deployment. It appears that this isn’t possible with Grails, but I want to make sure before I write it off.
As far as modifying controllers goes, it would be sufficient if the Groovlet behavior existed (compile-on-demand).
As far as plugin installs go, I understand this may be a long shot, but I thought I’d check to be sure.
For your information, I need this because I work on a product that requires a little site-specific customization, such as adding validation of simple meta-data, integrating with customer security environments, and maybe even including new controllers/pages quickly.
Out of the box, no, grails doesn’t really support what you want. There may be ways to customize it but I’ve never looked into it. A PHP framework might be more of your ally since there is no real deployment process other than copying PHP files to a location.
That said, I personally would prefer a strict set of deployment policies. And honestly, deploying changes with Grails is as simple as running the ‘grails war’ command and copying that war to your servlet container. The site’s downtime is negligible and if you have multiple web servers with a load-balancer, your customers should never see down time due to deployments.