You dont know how lucky you are

Over the past 18 months ive been lucky enough to have almost exclusively been involved in projects developed with Grails. During this time I have seen a big change in my development style, I find myself focusing more on getting things done as opposed to figuring out how things work.

Today I kicked off a small consulting engagement with a client that is looking to productionise a prototype web application written with a mainstream Java web framework. Boy, what an eye opener! For the most part the application has been written well, but there is just so much of it. The scope of this application is lower than the Grails projects I have worked on, but the volume of code is grossly disproportionate. Thinking that this doesnt quite seem right I tried to apply some basic refactoring to the code, but soon gave up because I was just massaging valid application code. It honestly just seems to take a lot more Java code to get things done. I really am not wanting to unleash to much negativity on Java here, after all Java is within Groovys DNA. But I was just really surprised by the immediate contrast I noticed when switching back to Java after a sustained period of Groovy coding.