Autobase Released

I’m officially releasing the Autobase plugin for Grails. It’s technically a 0.2 release — if I get a lot of positive feedback and implement a couple more features (see JIRA for Autobase), then I’ll do the official 1.0 release.

The Grails framework is the best web development framework out there right now. One of the things that makes it so impressive is that it has a unique paradigm: leverage existing, proven open-source technologies, but ship them with a set of reasonable defaults and preconfigure them to work well with eachother. The result is something that provides exceedingly fast development while still having a mature core.

Before the Autobase plugin, there simply wasn’t a way to manage databases which fit in that same paradigm. The Liquibase plugin provided a raw way of bolting the excellent Liquibase system onto the side of Grails, but there was a lot of XML and some weird commands and it didn’t really flow with the otherwise smooth Grails development process. The dbmigrate plugin mirrored Rails’s problematic initial swing at database migrations and left you having to hand-code up SQL. And it still didn’t flow with the Grails development process—if I forget to run “grails migrate” after pulling code from git, I’d be in trouble. And if I wanted to deploy my application as a war instead of as a set of files, I’m in real trouble.

This just wouldn’t do. So, being an open source, DIY kinda guy, I set to writing up an alternative. Something which made it easy to handle migrations. Something which supported deployment as a war or as flat files. Something which leveraged a proven open source technology. Something which, in short, followed the Grails paradigm and kicked ass. Autobase is the result.

~~ Robert Fischer, Smokejumper Consulting