Clean up

Grails create-app command generates many code we do not really need in the application. Let's clean it up.

Remove assets

We can remove grails-app/assets folder because all required assets are provided by Vaadin.

Remove views

When we use Vaadin as UI framework, we need no .gsp pages in our application. We can remove grails-app/views.

Dependencies

There are not needed dependencies if we use Vaadin. We can exclude them globaly.

Add excludes in BuildConfig.groovy as follows.

grails.project.dependency.resolution = {
    inherits("global") {
        'grails-plugin-gsp', 'grails-plugin-rest', 'grails-resources'
    }

Verify what has been excluded by running grails dependency-report command. You can add a scope as the parameter, for example, grails dependency-report compile, grails dependency-report runtime and so on. In order to be sure that a dependency is excluded, run grails clean-all before the commands mentioned above.

The second step in clearing dependencies is to remove all dependencies and plugins that are generated by Grails. Dependencies and plugins part of BuildConfig.groovy will then become like this.

dependencies {
}

plugins {
    build ":tomcat:7.0.55"
    compile ":vaadin:7.2.5"
}

Last step

Grails generates inline comments for almost each property trying to explain what is the purpose of that property. I think if somebody wants to know what is the meaning of a property, he should go to documentation, read about it and fully understand what is it about. Therefore I suggest to remove these comments.