Development is easy. Creating product is hard.

I’m working very long hours at the moment. By day I work on Weceem CMS and by night I am acting as the architect and producer of a new web service that I am developing with some friends.

Of course the web service is being built with Grails – it would be insane to use anything else! Chris our developer is doing an excellent job – Grails is massively empowering. In the timescale we’ve been working to an amazing amount of stuff has been achieved – even when some of it is being learned on the job.

Oh and of course the core idea is there but the details are being fleshed out as it is developed, but Grails reduces the pain for Chris as changing direction on some features is not as heartbreaking as throwing out weeks of work on thousands of lines of code.

Our designer Pat is also working well with editing GSPs directly, something new for her which she is enjoying, along with learning the joys of Blueprint CSS and jQuery UI.

However, what was obvious to me before starting this project, is painfully obvious to me now. Modern tools like Grails take the classically hard part of making a software product and turn the problem upside down.

We don’t spend time fiddling around with config and trying to glue various tech together, writing reams of bean accessors and lame JDBC code etc. – we spend all our time trying to meet the challenge of creating an application that really makes sense to users, hides all the technical detail – while providing features that a few years ago would have been considered very low priority due to the work required to get even the basics off the ground.

Expectations of modern web apps, especially the expectations that come from ourselves as designers and users of such services, are very high.

This is however a “high quality problem” compared to chipping away at a massive mountain of code just to get something half-assed ready, and deferring all the parts that are important and useful to end users (and hence ultimately the business) until later.

Time is of the essence. Grails cuts out maybe first 3 months of dev, and we focus on the business problems.

It’s a no-brainer in that sense.