Previous (1)Grails has been great so far for rapid development, but it can be limiting when it comes to deployments. Even in the early stages of this website, the generated .war file is around 40MB. I'd prefer to upload files of this size from a stable terrestrial service instead of a 3G hotspot. Sometimes it's just not possible to upload such a large file when traveling if network reception is spotty or only ~2G is available. I often times find myself in remote areas for days at a time and it would be nice to update this site without uploading a new distribution or relying on a hosted database to provide dynamic content.
I've decided to use a .json file as a datastore for blog postings and image gallery definitions. The content will be stored on either GitHub or Dropbox and read as needed to fulfill requests. This will incur a small latency penalty since the server will need to read and parse the file with each request, but it should act as a great alternative to a database instance in low-volume scenarios.