Grails : a quick-start guide

Grails: A Quick-Start Guide offers a survey of Java web development and Grails dynamics, showing how to use Grails to build a unique application. The project-oriented approach assures programmer readers gain access to Grails' many possibilities and the concluding result - a real, functioning website - teaches all the basics about domain classes, controllers, and how to use Grails to work within powerful online frameworks. Contents 7 Introduction 10 Let Me Tell You About Grails... 10 How Does Grails Do It? 11 Why This Book? 12 Who Should Read This Book 13 Source Code 13 Enough Groovy to Be Dangerous 14 Groovy Syntax Compared to Java 14 Groovy Strings 16 Groovy Closures 17 Groovy Collections 18 Where to from Here? 22 Acknowledgments 23 Our Project 25 Introducing TekDays.com 26 Meet Our Customer 26 Iteration Zero 28 Summary 34 Laying the Foundation 35 Creating a Domain Class 35 More About Domain Classes 37 Testing Our Domain Class 38 Taking Control of Our Domain 41 Modifying Code That Doesn't Exist 42 Bootstrapping Some Test Data 45 Summary 49 Building Relationships 53 The TekUser Domain Class 53 One-to-One Relationships 55 One-to-Many Relationships 60 Collections of Simple Data Types 62 Adding a Sponsor Class 64 Many-to-Many Relationships 66 Finishing Up the Domain Model 71 Summary 73 Beyond Scaffolding 75 Generating Scaffolding Code 75 Anatomy of a Grails Controller 76 Grails Views with Groovy Server Pages 83 Configuring a Database 94 Summary 97 Getting Things Done 98 Changing All Our Views at Once 98 Modifying the Scaffolded Views 99 Event Task List 106 Grails Service Classes 108 Integration Testing 111 Modifying the Task Class 113 Summary 114 Forum Messages and UI Tricks 116 Restricting Messages to an Event 116 Of Templates and Ajax 122 Display Message Threads with a Custom Tag 128 Summary 133 Knock, Knock: Who's There? Grails Security 135 Grails Security Options 135 Logging In 136 Filters 139 Logging Out 142 Summary 144 Big-Picture Views 146 Home Page Makeover 146 Creating a New Controller 149 Designing the Dashboard View 150 Adding the Dashboard Action 156 Adding a Menu 158 Linking to the Dashboard 160 Summary 162 Seek, and You Shall Find 163 Search Using Dynamic Finders 163 Hibernate Criteria Builder 166 The Big Guns: The Searchable Plug-In 170 Summary 177 Icing on the Cake 178 The Grails UI Plug-In 178 The Twitter Plug-In 183 Making the Event Page Customizable with the Blurb Plug-In 189 User-Friendly URLs 193 Summary 196 Deployment and Beyond 198 Using a JNDI Data Source 198 Creating and Deploying a WAR 200 Next Steps 201 Parting Thoughts 202 Additional CSS Rules 203 Resources 205 Online Resources 205 Meet the G3 Community 206 Other Resources 210 IDE Support 211 Bibliography 213 Index 214 Symbols 214 A 214 B 214 C 214 D 215 E 216 F 216 G 216 H 218 I 218 J 218 K 219 L 219 M 219 N 219 O 219 P 220 R 220 S 220 T 221 U 223 V 223 W 223 Y 223 Grails is a full stack web development framework that enables you to build complete web applications in a fraction of the time and with less code than other frameworks. In Grails: A Quick-Start Guide , you'll see how to use Grails by iteratively building an unique, working application. By the time we're done, you'll have built and deployed a real, functioning website. Along the way, we'll learn about domain classes, controllers, and GSP views. We'll see how Grails allows us to use powerful frameworks like Spring and Hibernate without even knowing it. Using this hands-on, pragmatic approach, we'll explore topics such as AJAX in Grails, custom tags, and plugins. We'll dig into Grails' powerful view technology, Groovy Server Pages, and see how we can easily leverage the help given to us by scaffolding to create custom user interfaces faster than you would have thought possible. With Grails, you can get a lot done with little effort. With this book, you'll get a lot done as well. It's time to bring the fun back into web programming. Get started with Grails today. Grails is a full stack web development framework that enables you to build complete web applications in a fraction of the time and with less code than other frameworks. This book shows how to use Grails by iteratively building an unique, working application. I personally like to thank the author for making the extra effort to see grails through the eyes of a beginner. I read this book in 3 days and it prepared me well for other more advanced ones. I wish all beginners books were like this one. Provides information on using Grails to create applications and build an effective Web site.