Presentations

Seven Steps to Learning Grails

Grails is emerging as a standard JVM web framework in environments ranging from startups to the enterprise. It's a full-stack solution build on rock-solid components, fully relying on convention over configuration, and using the best application language the JVM has yet seen: Groovy. This is the place to be for web apps on the JVM.

In this introductory talk, we'll get a whirlwind introduction to Grails, visiting seven things you need to know about the framework to get started.

1. Creating an app
2. Development using the Tomcat server
3. Interacting with the database
4. Building your UI
5. Processing web requests
6. Tapping the huge plugin community
7. Deploying to production

Grails Without SQL

Out of the box, Grails famously relies on Hibernate for database persistence through the agency of GORM, the Grails Object-Relational Mapping API. But are Grails apps permanently beholden to relational datastores, even when the relational model is not an appropriate solution for the problem at hand? No!

Grails provides popular plugins for such NoSQL contenders as MongoDB, Voldemort, Cassandra, and Redis. In this session, we'll take a quick look at each of those four NoSQL database technologies, how the products function on their own, and how their Grails plugins work. We'll also take a long step back and develop an understanding of why NoSQL products exist and how they differentiate themselves as containers for our data.