So the builder approach seemed to make sense. The only trouble is that render(contentType:’text/json’) { … } uses Grails default JSONBuilder which I have discovered sucks, and also blows.

The default JSONBuilder uses method calls for everything. However in some cases the method name is ignored - eg elements of an array. Also you can only set name/value pairs with simple method(value) constructs on the root node of the builder, as in subnodes each one of these creates a new object eg { method: value }. The final blow for me was that property values of anything other than simple types are just rendered as strings. For example a property value that is an array of ints is rendered as a string so "[1, 2, 3, 4]" because JSONWriter has just a def value(Object) method that calls toString(). This is in contrast to the "as JSON" converter construct which works nicely with nested objects and is sane when it comes to recursion/parent node references.

So as soon as you step away from trivial lists and have any kind of object graph to represent, it falls down.

Enough was enough so I knocked this together. It needs a lot more sanity checking in there and possibly some optimisation but it took half an hour and it works. Using it is a case of calling "render new BetterJSONBuilder() { … }".

What it does is use any method calls with a Map to create a new JSON object with those properties. Any method call with a closure creates a new array OR object - if the first call in a closure is to "element(value)" it will create an array. Property access is permitted on object nodes eg you set properties with x=y not with x(y) as in the standard horrible JSONBuilder.

Internally it just creates a tree of maps/lists and then uses "as JSON" to do the conversion. Short and sweet.

Update: I found this morning that I missed out the "import grails.converters.JSON" from this. I also discovered that for me at least, if I imported the deep.JSON converter, I was getting lots of "Value out of sequence" exceptions. Using the normal non-deep JSON converter all is fine and, weirdly, nested objects seem fine too - e.g. I have a top level JS object, a value within it that is an array of other objects, and those objects have an array property also. All rendering fine without deep JSON converter.

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Line numbers are now shown in source code when you append ?showSource to your URL in development mode. This is extremely handy for debugging GSPs.

Thank you Graeme, or whoever implemented it.

This version fixes several annoying bugs that results in seemingly irrelevant error messages, and adds support for RSS enclosures, as well as iTunes music store specific podcast tags.

This version is in production serving up a podcast in the iTunes Music Store.

To install type: grails install-plugin grails-feeds

Documentation updated to include enclosures and iTunes tags is here

I’m working on some trivial Javascript code for a new site to add a little dynamic behaviour, using the "trusty" Prototype JS library that we have loved before. Only, property/array access on Hash objects is not working any more. I waste a lot of time on this.

Then I find this blog post on the prototype website.

Yes that’s right, in version 1.6 they made a completely breaking change to the behaviour of Hash - array indexing is no longer possible, you must call Hash.get(key). This makes me rather worried as it seems the developers are not aware of the concept of minor revisions not changing the public interface of a library.

Bizarre. I can only wonder what other functionality will be broken in other pre-2.0 releases. This has shaken my confidence in Prototype I must say.