Comp 0.1

I've finally got enough of the comp project completed to make a dodgy initial release. I feel I've made enormous progress over the holiday period and the following functionality is in place:

• users can add an entry to a competition
• admin can create a competition
• admin can generate random winners
• winners are generated for each prize that the competition has

There are still many things to do but this version contains all the basic functions. So far the learning experience has been huge. I've read heaps of articles and a couple of grails books but it wasn't until I actually applied the knowledge that I really started to learn.

In addition to grails/groovy, the other big win for me out of the project so far has been Git. I can't speak highly enough of it and the cool way branches can be created for very little storage cost. I have been creating new branches willy nilly to experiment with different strategies. If things don't work out, I have been able to easily revert to any other version. The low cost comes because Git creates a hash of each file and then references those hashes instead of duplicating files in each new branch. Brilliant really!

Also in other news, I've just been using a plain old text editor (well the quite awesome Textmate) instead of Netbeans so far. Don't get me wrong I like Netbeans but Grails is so simple that I don't really need the Netbeans power at this stage. There is only a beta git plug in for Netbeans too, so in reality even if using Netbeans I would still have been 'gitting' from the command line.

Have a happy and safe New Year everyone, more dev news next year.