What's a plugin-oriented architecture?
Grails is a fantastic framework for developing web applications quickly and easily. You also have access to a plethora of plugins that provide features or make integration with other systems nice and easy. That's all good, but in this article I want to talk about what happens when your application grows and you start drowning in a sea of controllers, domain classes, and other files.
Separation of concerns
One of the most useful patterns in software architecture is called separation of concerns. The idea is that you group everything related to a particular feature or concern into a single, self-contained unit. The code in that unit should not take on any other responsibility. For example, the business logic of a web service should be in one class while the handling of SOAP messages should be in another: the business logic and SOAP handling are two different concerns.The real beauty of this pattern is that you can aggregate these units into coarser-grained concerns, so you end up using the pattern at multiple levels. For example, say that the web service mentioned above…