Customer Reviews

The Definitive Guide to Grails

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm new to groovy/grails and hoped that the book would help me progress beyond the basic examples. Unfortunately this was not the case, as from about page 160 or so I was unable to keep my version of the bookmark application working (using grails 0.5.6). I even downloaded the source for the book and that would not run either. As a suggestion the book source code should be organized via chapter. In that way it is easier to follow the changes as the application is developed.

Having given this book a low rating, it's clearly going to be a great work once the second edition is published (hopefully shortly after the grails 1.0 release). Generally the text was well written, and very informative, and I'll be buying the second edition when it does come out! As a previous poster noted, how Graeme finds the time to do all that he does is amazing.

As to grails, I think it's got real potential, coupled with AJAX and grails should be a killer app - sorry framework.

Today's enterprise Java development is complex, tedious and challenging. In spite of numerous frameworks including Spring framework and HIBERNATE trying to address this complexity and make development simple, the truth is it is not simple. The Java developer community deserves a true framework built on very similar agile development principles that Ruby on Rails was built upon; DRY, Convention over Configuration and Boilerplate Code Generation.

Grails combines the power of Java, Groovy, Spring, HIBERNATE and more under the covers and brings out a true framework that increases your productivity to great levels.

This book clearly explains the concepts. Though some of the material and examples are little old compared to the latest Grails release, it is worth reading this book to understand the concepts. It will change the way you think and build Java applications.

A must read by every Java professional.

Really great book!

It shows not only how fast and easy Web Application development can be on the Java Platform what you may expect as this is the book description but it also shows that Grails perfectly combines quality and productivity. High quality applications need to be easily automated testable. Authors presenting new technologies often forget this point but not Graeme who shows through the whole book how to take care to the quality of your application and even dedicates a special chapter to testing.

Grails brings a smart, productive framework like Rails to the Java world, by way of Groovy. What's not to like about that? With Grails, you can create your standard Hibernate+Spring web application without slogging through reams of xml configuration or xdoclet notations. When you need to, you can drop back to Java - it's totally integrated.

It's a truly great framework, and this is a truly great book that describes everything you need to get started with it and more.

Reading the theory and having no intentions to do a real project is fine but when you run the book's single example and it fails at every step and on top of that Grails suggest the >grails update which makes worse as this is the only reference. It could have been a good book but there is a huge jump from basic grails create-app to full scale app. If anybody has the working example, I will appreciate using it.

First off I would like to say that Grails is an awesome framework, and I am currently using it 2 large scale projects. However, this book is basically a rehash of the online documentation that is available for free on grails.org. Very little of the additional text that grows this to the size of a book is worth reading, and too many topics are glossed over and not thoroughly explained. There is also too much assumed background on Java web development. particularly knowledge of Spring, Hibernate, Servlets, and JSP. While most people who are using Grails are probably Java developers, this book does nothing to help attract crowds familiar with ASP.NET, Ruby On Rails, PHP, Perl CGI, Python Django, etc; nor those who are new to web development.

Save your money and go to grails.org and browse the documentation there, and in the meantime we'll all be waiting for some more in depth Grails books to come out like the one on GORM.

This book was a great reading. I was able to learn grails in a very short time. It was written in a simple, direct and accessible way. All concepts were well explained and demonstrated. The suggestion to improve it is to have some annex containing all command lines and some hints on write more groovier code.

I picked up Graeme's Grails book while in a Barnes & Noble store recently, while waiting out the evening rush hour in Silicon Valley. I've already been fiddling with Ruby on Rails and like it, and although I'd heard of Grails I instinctively thought it couldn't measure up to RoR as a framework. Wow, was I wrong. Graeme does a very good job in explaining and demonstrating how Grails makes it drop dead simple to whip up simple web apps, while also providing a nice compact intro to Groovy the language. The reason I give the book 5 stars is that Graeme clearly understands the real world of app development, and at a higher level, Graeme and his Grails framework takes us a huge leap closer to the Promised Land of computing: when you want it simple, it's simple with sensible defaults, but when you need or want to dive deeper, Grails lets you do that. I could have used Grails and its seamless on demand integration with Java and custom Java libraries many, many times in the past. The thing I kept wishing, when looking at Zope, Ruby on Rails and friends is for some clean way to tap into all the business logic that organizations have spent a decade investing in, via Java and J2EE development. Grails does that! The book is well paced, and I'm very glad I bought it.

The name says it all: Grails really is the holy grail of dynamic web application development on the Java platform and this book definitely is the definitive guide to find it.

Rarely has a project manager and lead developer written such a comprehensive guide to a technology so timely while being busy developing. My highest respect for Graeme, who covers the topic in very accessible way and leads us to a new level of productivity. Congratulations!