GRAG - The GRails Application Generator

Sunday, September 12, 2010 » Application Generator, GRAG, Grails, Groovy

GRAG is a horrible sounding name for a super-useful program.  GRAG, or GRails Application Generator, allows a user to reverse-engineer an existing database and generate Grails domain entities or a Grails application.  Another function of GRAG is it's ability to generate domain entities or an application based on a UML diagram.  Although I haven't tried importing a UML design yet, I find the concept very appealing as many of my projects begin with UML.  GRAG also supports exporting a UML file.

<!--break-->My brief testing of GRAG has yielded seemingly correct results for a several databases.  GRAG's user interface is a little rough, and it takes some time to figure out how to use it, but once it's working, it's pretty straightforward.  GRAG generated domain entities for some pretty complex databases applications, including those for a complete sophisticated accounting package.   While I have yet to use GRAG for any production work, I believe it'll be a valuable asset for interfacing Grails to existing systems.

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