Grails on Heroku

[Note: The Information in the following post is out of date. Please use the Grails Heroku plugin instead ( edited Dec 19, 2011 )]

Heroku recently announced Java support. In this post, I will show you how to deploy Grails applications into Heroku using the Maven support available to Grails.

Heroku recommends building a jar file and executing this against an embedded Jetty instance. This solution simply does a simple grails run-app and is inspired by the Play! framework support in Heroku. ( BTW, why Roo & Play! and not Grails? )

Updated Sept. 02 – using jetty runner in the example.

Custom Theming a Grails Application – Our Approach

We recently changed the core Secret Escapes project to allow us to create white label integrations. Essentially, we needed to add the ability for our application to apply different themes depending on the provided affiliate or subdomain.

The end result of this work is that you get a differently branded experiences, while retaining much of the same functionality when visiting differently branded pages.

For example, this is the front page of http://www.secretescapes.com

and this is the front page of http://teletext.secretescapes.com

In this post, I will talk about some of the details of this custom theming work and some of the implementation details and decisions we took.