Grails, AngularJS and the Asset Pipeline
Grails and AngularJs are two incredible frameworks and with the newer REST features of Grails they can be a pretty nice pairing. That isn’t to say that there isn’t some work involved in getting them to play well together though.
I’ve developed a couple of Grails Asset Pipeline plugins to help with that: Angular Template Asset Pipeline and Angular Annotate Asset Pipeline.
I’ve also created an example app that makes use of these two plugins and includes some directives and services to make development a bit easier (similar to Rob Fletcher’s Grails Angular Scaffolding project).
You can see a demo of the app here: Grails Angular App Demo
Here’s an overview of my Angular related projects:
Angular Grails Lazybones Template
This is a lazybones template that hopefully provides a good jumping off point for anyone looking to use Grails and AngularJS together. I’m still actively tweaking and improving upon this project. Any feedback or suggestions are certainly welcome.
Angular Annotate Asset Pipeline Plugin
By default the Asset Pipeline plugin will minify all the Javascript files in your project. This breaks the dependency injection used by AngularJS (which relies on specific parameter names).
This plugin makes use of ngannotate so that your Javascript can be safely minified.
Angular Template Asset Pipeline Plugin
This allows you to create static templates from html or gsp files that get inserted into Angular’s $templateCache.
Since these templates are incorporated in your JavaScript files, this eliminates the issue with some browsers caching your templates (the JS and templates are always in sync).
As a side benefit it promotes a nice organization based on the module name. For example a template for the module myApp.directives.buttons would be placed in /assets/templates/my-app/directives/buttons.
This plugin also allows you to define your static Angular templates using the fields plugin or other Groovy expressions. This lets you use Angular without having to lose all the niceties you get with GSPs.
If you decide to use any of these projects or have any feedback please let me know. I’d love to hear how other people are using Grails and AngularJS together