Grails represents technology that offers great flexibility and power without the complexity introduced by other Java web application frameworks. Custom tag libraries are a snap. GSP Templates provide a simple mechanism for reusing UI elements. Sitemesh is integrated to help provide a consistent presentation across the entire application. GORM is super powerful ORM. Grails provides simple mechanisms for leveraging the power of Ajax.
This session will cover all of the fundamentals of the framework and will serve as a thorough introduction to developers not familiar with the framework and also include a number of tips and tricks for developers who do have experience with the framework.
In this session, Grails core developer Jeff Brown will deliver an update on the latest and greats features of the Grails framework - a dynamic, web application framework based on the Groovy language and designed for Spring.
Jeff will cover all the new features of Grails 2.0 including agent-based reloading, unit testing mixins, really powerful new ways to express GORM queries and more. Attendees will gain key knowledge of the latest techniques for building Grails applications on the Spring platform.
The dynamic nature of Groovy makes it a fantastic language for building dynamic applications for the Java Platform. The metaprogramming capabilities offered by the language provide everything that an application development team needs to build systems that are far more capable than their all Java counterparts. Taking advantage of Groovy's metaprogramming capabilities brings great new possibilities that would be very difficult or just plain impossible to write with Java alone. Building Domain Specific Languages in Groovy is easy to do once a team has a good understanding of the Metaobject-Protocol (MOP) and the method dispatch mechanisms used by the Groovy runtime environment.
This session will cover in detail a number of advanced metaprogramming concepts in Groovy. The discussion will cover using dynamic method interception, metaclass customizations and Groovy's Metaobject-Protocol (MOP) to build flexible applications in Groovy including implementing a Domain Specific Language (DSL).
The rise of Ruby on Rails has signified a huge shift in how we build web applications today; it is a fantastic framework with a growing community. There is, however, space for another such framework that integrates seamlessly with Java. Thousands of companies have invested in Java, and these same companies are losing out on the benefits of a Rails–like framework. Enter Grails.
Grails is not just a Rails clone. It aims to provide a Rails–like environment that is more familiar to Java developers and employs idioms that Java developers are comfortable using, making the adjustment in mentality to a dynamic framework less of a jump. The concepts within Grails, like interceptors, tag libs, and Groovy Server Pages (GSP), make those in the Java community feel right at home.
Grails’ foundation is on solid open source technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh, which gives it even more potential in the Java space: Spring provides powerful inversion of control and MVC, Hibernate brings a stable, mature object relational mapping technology with the ability to integrate with legacy systems, and SiteMesh handles flexible layout control and page decoration.
Grails complements these with additional features that take advantage of the coding–by–convention paradigm such as dynamic tag libraries, Grails object relational mapping, Groovy Server Pages, and scaffolding.
Graeme Rocher, Grails lead and founder, and Jeff Brown bring you completely up–to–date with their authoritative and fully comprehensive guide to the Grails framework. You’ll get to know all the core features, services, and Grails extensions via plug–ins, and understand the roles that Groovy and Grails are playing in the changing Web.
This book is for everyone who is looking for a more agile approach to web development with a dynamic scripting language such as Groovy. This includes a large number of Java developers who have been enticed by the productivity gains seen with frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, JRuby on Rails, etc. The Web and its environment is a perfect fit for easily adaptable and concise languages such as Groovy and Ruby, and there is huge interest from the developer community in general to embrace these languages.