Gigism Redux

So I failed horrible at getting an alpha version of Gigism running with Grails. It wasn't because of the programming language or web framework (Groovy and Grails, in this case). It was mainly because I was mentally fried and not in a good spot to be learning a new language and framework when I really had not be exposed to the object relational mapping that I attempting to make use.

I've spent the last three weeks reading, playing, and coding object relationships with Hibernate now. I think I understand more of the principles that were at play with GORM (the Groovey Object Relational Mapping API). But I've decided to change the overall foundation of Gigism and go with something that I'm much more familiar with: Tapestry.

Well, not just Tapestry. I'm really attempting to mimic the application setup that I use on a daily basis at my current job (Tapestry with Spring and Hibernate).

Since making the decision to go down the familiar route, I've managed to get an initial database schema in place along with building a good alpha data-layer with Hibernate (using annotations). I've got some unit-tests in place, and I'm rather happy with the progress in that area. I've also bogarted a template/layout for the initial site. I'm not really a wizard with the ol' HTML/CSS - so having a good, attractive setting point is nice (and it appears that there is no shortage of free layouts on the web - many of which are released under Creative Commons).

Along with unit-testing my code, I've started to play with Selenium RC to get testing in place for the client interface. I'm hoping that it will allow me to deliver something a bit more stable (or at least stable early on). Coming from the .NET side of the development fence, I'm not an avid tester (like many in the Java community). I guess this is an attempt at coming "test infected." Oh, and I am looking at using Groovy for my unit-tests. The initial stuff I have is just regular Java with JUnit - but I would like to use Groovy when coming tests just because of the terseness of the code. I really do like the language overall, I just found myself in over my head when trying to do a site.