Grails 1.1 Web Application Development

Web development is tricky–even a simple web application has a number of context changes ready to trip up the unwary. Grails takes the everyday pain out of web application development, allowing us to focus on delivering real application logic and create seamless experiences that will address the needs of our users. This book will take the pain out of Grails by showing you exactly how to build a web application with a minimum of fuss.

With this book, even if you are new to Grails, you will be up and running before you know it. You will be able to code faster and your code will be better. This clear and concise book is packed with examples and clear instructions to help you build your first Grails application and gives you the skills to speed up your application development by adding a different angle for learning about the topic. After a brief introduction to the dynamic JVM-based Groovy programming language, which teaches you enough about Groovy to understand the relationship between Grails and the Groovy scripting language, it shows how to use Grails and a number of key plug-ins to deliver valuable web applications. It also takes you through creating, developing, testing, and deploying an example team collaboration application in Grails.

Using an incremental and iterative approach you will learn how to build a basic web application with secure authentication and different levels of authorization. You will learn how to handle file upload allowing users to share files. Some advanced features of object-oriented persistence will be introduced through adding tags for messages and files to giving users a robust categorization system.

You will then build on the basic application to enhance the user experience through AJAX and the RichUI plug-in. You will take a further step into the world of Web 2.0 by adding an RSS feed and a REST service to the application. Once the entire application is up and running, you will learn how to create your own plug-in for tagging. Finally, you will learn how to deploy this application to a production environment.

What you will learn from this book?

* Understand the relationship between Grails and the Groovy scripting language
* Learn enough about Groovy to get you writing your first Grails applications
* Use the built-in AJAX support to enhance user interaction and create slick user interfaces with the RichUI plug-in
* Develop and use a REST service interface and provide an API through REST
* Handle file upload and versioning allowing users to share files
* Use Grails scaffolding to generate a user interface to allow management of users and roles within the application.
* Secure your application with the JSecurity plug-in and use plug-ins to solve common problems
* Reduce object persistence issues using Grails Object-Relational Mapper
* Create your own Grails plug-in for tagging to limit the amount of data that is displayed on your home page
* Get to grips with automated testing to write functional tests that drive the application
* Expose your application to other developers with a RESTful API

Approach

This book is a guide to building a rich web application using Grails. The approach taken for building the application is incremental and iterative; each chapter will produce a working addition to the application, or iterate over existing features, as well as introduce and carefully explain the new part of the Grails framework used. The book does not go into exhaustive descriptions of every detail of Grails. While there is a lot of code in the book, there are very few large code listings. As you will find, it is not necessary to write reams of code to get results using Groovy and Grails.

Who this book is written for?

This book is aimed at Java web developers looking for ways to build web applications quickly, and wanting to find out how it's done quickly. If you are frustrated with integrating the many different frameworks that are available for web development and want to get on with building slick web applications for your users, then this book is for you. Grails is built on the Groovy language, but experience in Groovy is not required, as you will learn enough about Groovy to understand how to use Grails.

About the Author

Jon Dickinson is the principal consultant and founder of Accolade Consulting Ltd. and can be contacted at jon@accolade-consulting.co.uk. He specializes in developing web applications on the Java platform to meet the goals of users in the simplest and least obtrusive way possible.