Not Your Father's Custom Tags

One of the most compelling features of Grails is it's custom tag libraries. Yet many developers, especially those coming from a JSP or JSF background, run from the room screaming when someone suggests creating a custom tag. Grails custom tag libraries are a powerful way to encapsulate business logic and keep code out of our pages. They are also great for declaring intent and making pages more readable. But here's the best part... they are ridiculously easy to create.

We will have a brief tutorial on creating Grails custom tags and then build a few to demonstrate just how easy it can be to tap into this powerful feature. We will also see how we can bundle our custom tags into a Grails plugin to reuse in our other projects or to share with the community.

About Dave Klein

Dave is a consultant helping organizations of all sizes to develop applications more quickly (and have more fun doing it) with Grails. Dave has been involved in enterprise software development for the past 15 years. He has worked as a developer, architect, project manager, mentor and trainer. Dave has presented at user groups and national conferences. He is also the founder of the Capital Java User Group in Madison, Wisconsin, the Gateway Groovy Users in St. Louis, MO, and the author of Grails: A Quick-Start Guide, published by the Pragmatic Programmers. . Dave's Groovy and Grails related thoughts can be found at http://dave-klein.blogspot.com

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