Updating from Grails 2.3 to something newer

We are developing, running and maintaining moderately sized Grails web application with > 120 domain classes  since 2008 or Grails 1.0.3. The web application is still in production running on Grails 2.3.8. Just recently we wanted Java 8 support and the usual bugfixes and improvements you get by updating the framework. Since time and budget are very limited (as always…) we decided not to move to 3.x but only to the latest 2.x version. It seemed a safer and easier option and opened up the way to 3.x where many things changed completely.

Trying to go to 2.5.4

The upgrade procedure is generally well documented in Grails. That allowed us to upgrade from 1.0 to 1.3, from 1.3 to 2.2 and finally from 2.2 to 2.3. We skipped 2.0 because of too many problems we faced during the upgrade. As usual the major changes and tasks are mentioned in the upgrade guide. It started smoothly but we finally had to abort the upgrade process because we were bitten by https://github.com/grails/grails-data-mapping/issues/581 . We had not the time to dig fully into it and resolve the issue.

Trying to go to 2.4.5

Many of the changes and improvements and most notably a Groovy version supporting the Java 8 runtime are already available in Grails 2.4.5. So we gave it a shot hoping for fewer problems than with 2.5.4. Actually we got our application running in less than an hour but quite some of our unit, integration and functional tests failed. After finding some advice in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16532631/grails-unit-test-mock-domain-with-assigned-id we changed our unit tests to use the @Mock() mixin instead of mockDomain() which works in 2.3 and is broken in 2.4.

When trying to fix our integration tests we saw that some of our HQL queries failed. Something was wrong navigating/querying multiple association levels so we finally gave up on this one, too.

Conclusion

Even though we managed to keep our Grails application alive for many years and several framework versions each upgrade carries a significant risk of breakage and requires quite some effort. This time we are stuck again and will have to invest more time to bring the application up-to-date again.

I would advise anyone already using or deciding for Grails as the web framework of choice to start with the latest and greatest release and to budget several person days for upgrades of medium sized projects. The devil is in the details…