Really Grails, Really?

I'm a bit grumpy at Grails today. We're trying to get a Grails app into something like a production-ready state and Grails is repeatedly showing me that it really doesn't want to be there.

 A couple of weeks ago, our Ops guys requested (completely reasonably) that the app be configurable "externally" - i.e. tweak a properties file somewhere on the filesystem, restart the app, and bingo.

Rather than the godawful files-in-classpath mess that results in excessive trawling through unpacked WAR files in Tomcat's webapps directory, followed by nervous vi-ing and praying something doesn't come along and blow away your delicate changes. Nod sagely if you've done that crap about a bazillion times.

So the change was duly made, there are a million "externalise your Grails config" blogs out there, Google away if you care. But they almost all are totally on the Groovy Kool-Aid: the externalised config files are .groovy files - curly brackets and all that. Our guys not only don't like that (don't blame them), but they won't allow it for security reasons - you can put executable "stuff" in such a file and do who-knows-what to a system.

So the Grails Doco on externalised config says .properties files are A-OK. Great! Let's try something then:

In our externalised property file:

config.feature.enabled = false

In a Grails controller, some time later:

if (config.feature.enabled) {
  println "Combobulating the Doodads"
} else {
  println "Enabled I Am Not"
}

Execute.

And get very, very VERY annoyed.