On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Peter Ledbrook <[email protected]> wrote: >> Its a tough call, when you think of what we may have to write from scratch. >> >> Thoughts? Ideas? > > What type of configuration are we talking about? I'm a little confused > by the references to Spring.
Basically any configuration format that can be used to build an object graph. Spring's XML is just one example that I surfaced. YAML is another. > The Grails plugin supports two different types of configuration. The > first uses config files based on Groovy's ConfigSlurper, which are > similar(ish) to YAML. It's used for setting the session mode, whether > authentication is required by default, etc. The second allows users to > override individual Spring beans and provide their own > implementations. Actually, the Grails reference surfaces Groovy, which I can't believe I did not think of before. I think Groovy would be a fantastic 'embeddable' text-based format since it doesn't require compilation. What about using Groovy as the default configuration format? Then an end user would be building a real object graph and still has the ability to call whatever lifecycle methods they want. And, Groovy allows natural Domain Specific Languages if we want to leverage that. And our end-users would be able to easily understand it, with little or no learning curve. Finally, groovy syntax is really clean and easy to follow. And the only additional dependency would be the groovy .jar. I like it! Does anyone have any thoughts about using (or not using) Groovy? - Les
