Utilizing Node.js Along Side Grails

[Gregg Bolinger]

Also asked here but it is likely to get closed.

We have a grails application in the wild. We'd like to give users using current browsers a better experience and provide some auto-updating of pieces of the site. Looking into all the options and specifically with Grails, I'm not impressed.

I really want to use WebSockets and from the investigating I've done up to this point I believe our best option is Node.js. But obviously we can't redo our application. I like Grails.

So my idea is that we use Node.js along side Grails to basically act as a READ-ONLY proxy between the client and the data. All the Node.js application will do is pull data from the database and deliver it to the client over WebSockets.

Does that sound like a valid approach? Is this something anyone else has done?

[Bill Gorder]

I have done an application where we used Atmosphere to deliver data to some thin clients over websockets. Atmosphere seemed to have some sort of issue or another on just about everything but Jetty though (despite their advertised support). I have never used Node.js but it seems like the idea is worth a try. My application was quite different from what you are attempting though as the browser was displayed on a projector (not something the user could interact with) and we just updated it. There was also a fixed number of these thin clients so I am not sure how all of this scales.