Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional) (Paperback)

by Christopher M. Judd (Author), Joseph Faisal Nusairat (Author), Jim Shingler (Author)
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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Web frameworks are playing a major role in the creation of today's most compelling web applications, because they automate many of the tedious tasks, allowing developers to instead focus on providing users with creative and powerful features. Java developers have been particularly fortunate in this area, having been able to take advantage of Grails, an open source framework that supercharges productivity when building Java–driven web sites. Grails is based on Groovy, which is a very popular and growing dynamic scripting language for Java developers and was inspired by Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk.

Beginning Groovy and Grails is the first introductory book on the Groovy language and its primary web framework, Grails.

This book gets you started with Groovy and Grails and culminates in the example and possible application of some real–world projects. You follow along with the development of each project, implementing and running each application while learning new features along the way.

What you’ll learn

• Understand the fundamentals of the open source, dynamic Groovy scripting language and the Grails web framework.
• Capitalize upon Grails’ well–defined framework architecture to build web applications faster than ever before.
• Improve your web application with cutting–edge interface enhancements using Ajax.
• Use Grails’ object–relational mapping solution, GORM, to manage your data store more effectively than ever before.
• Take advantage of Groovy to create reporting services, implement batch processing, and create alternative client interfaces.
• Deploy and upgrade your Grails–driven applications with expertise and ease.
• Discover an alternative client in Groovy as well.

Who is this book for?

Java and web developers looking to learn and embrace the power and flexibility offered by the Grails framework and Groovy scripting language

About the Apress Beginning Series

The Beginning series from Apress is the right choice to get the information you need to land that crucial entry–level job. These books will teach you a standard and important technology from the ground up because they are explicitly designed to take you from “novice to professional.” You’ll start your journey by seeing what you need to know—but without needless theory and filler. You’ll build your skill set by learning how to put together real–world projects step by step. So whether your goal is your next career challenge or a new learning opportunity, the Beginning series from Apress will take you there—it is your trusted guide through unfamiliar territory!

About the Author
Christopher Judd is the president and primary consultant for Judd Solutions, LLC, an international speaker, an open source evangelist, the Central Ohio Java Users Group leader, and the coauthor of Enterprise Java Development on a Budget (Apress, 2003). He has spent 12 years architecting and developing software for Fortune 500 companies in various industries, including insurance, retail, government, manufacturing, and transportation. His current focus is consulting, mentoring, and training with Java, Java EE, Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME), mobile technologies, and related technologies.

Joseph Faisal Nusairat is a software developer who has been
working full time in the Columbus, Ohio, area since 1998, primarily focused on Java development. His career has taken him into a variety of Fortune 500 industries, including military applications, data centers, banking, internet security, pharmaceuticals, and insurance. Throughout this experience, he has worked on all varieties of application development, from design and architecture to development. Joseph, like most Java developers, is particularly fond of open source projects and tries to use as much open source software as possible
when working with clients. Joseph is a graduate of Ohio University with dual degrees in computer science and microbiology and a minor in chemistry. While at Ohio University, Joseph also dabbled in student politics and was a research assistant in the virology labs. Currently, Joseph works as a senior partner at Integrallis Software (http://www.integrallis.com). In his off-hours, he enjoys watching bodybuilding competitions and Broadway musicals, specifically anything with Lauren Molina.

Jim Shingler is a senior consulting IT architect for a major midwestern insurance and financial services company. The focus of his career has been using leading-edge technology to develop IT solutions for the insurance, financial services, and manufacturing industries. He has 11 years of large-scale Java experience and significant experience in distributed and relational technologies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 440 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (June 18, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430210451
• ISBN-13: 978-1430210450
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #242,436 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beginning?? Says Who?, August 17, 2008

By	Scott Davis - See all my reviews

Let me start by saying "Beginning Groovy and Grails" is the book that the Grails community has been clamoring for. Two very good books kicked off the Grails revolution ("Definitive Guide to Grails" and "Getting Started with Grails"), but both predate the 1.x version of Grails by many dot-versions and many years (as of the time of this review, August 2008). BGG will certainly have worthy competition on the bookshelf before long, but right now it is the book that we all have been waiting for. Luckily, it easily lives up to the heightened expectations.

After reading BGG cover to cover, it seems to break naturally into three sections: Core Groovy, Core Grails, and Ancillary Grails. This division is mine, not the authors; the table of contents lists 13 chapters with no explicit section breaks. (Whether the three sections correspond to the three authors is an interesting question -- the tone of voice and writing style is consistent across the entire book.)

The first three chapters do an admirable job of covering the Groovy language from the basics to advanced topics. Groovy offers lots of syntactic sugar that might initially catch a Java programmer off-guard. These features, once you've seen them, dramatically reduce the lines of code you have to write. But more than that, there are some fundamentally new features in Groovy that don't have an easy match in Java. Builders, Expandos, metaprogramming, and DSLs are all discussed in these early chapters. While you don't have to use these features yourself to be successful in Grails, it certainly helps the reader understand how much of the Grails "magic" occurs under the covers.

The next three chapters (Introduction to Grails, Building the User Interface, and Building Domains and Services) hit the Core Grails features hard. These 150 pages do a great job of walking you through the basics of getting a Grails application up and running with a minimum of effort. They also make testing feel like a natural part of the development process (which it should be!). Rather than having a single chapter dedicated to testing, each new topic organically includes testing as a way to validate that the new code does what it promises to do.

The remaining chapters (Security, Ajax, REST, Reporting, Batch Processing, Deploying, and Alternative Clients) make up close to half the book. Each chapter covers the subject material as advertised, including working sample code. Not every Grails application will use every feature discussed here, but I still found a clever snippet of code here or a nice explanation of a general concept that rewarded me for reading every chapter.

Overall, "Beginning Groovy and Grails" delivers on its title -- if you are new to either (or both) technologies, you will be up and running before you know it. But don't be fooled by the title; even though it has "Beginning" in it, this book doesn't shy away from the advanced topics, either. This isn't a completist volume. Rather, it is a broad survey of the Groovy and Grails ecosystem. Christopher, Joseph, and Jim covered a lot of ground in an easy, readable way. I highly recommend it.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Start to a great solution, June 28, 2008

By	Donald 'Donnie' Demuth (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

I come from a strong Django background and when I recently inherited the role of Lead Developer I had the power to make decisions for a small start-up. There were two requirements for the product the customer needed: database independence and it must be based on a java framework. Additionally, the team would be fairly small and we would have less than 4 month to deploy. Needless to say I felt Grails would make my life livable.

This book does a wonderful job introducing you to the Grails framework. To be honest, its hard to pick up Grails based on the documentation out on the net unless you already have experience with a similar framework. I had several members on my team that failed miserably with Grails who came from a Spring/Struts background. However, those who had Rails and Django experience could hit the ground running.

If this book came out earlier, I'm sure the 'other' developers could've had less headaches. The book holds you hand and introduces you to the simplicity this technology offers. Give Grails a shot and get this book! Yes, the framework and language isn't quite mature yet and does have a number of 'gotchas.' But with its glowing community I can see it easily improve and become a very popular choice in the job market.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great for Development Managers, December 16, 2008

By	Charles Boecking (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Used this book to create a prototype website in Grails. This book seemed tailor-made for the job. This book helped a small development team design, build and deploy a proof-of-concept retail site in one weekend. Our team had lots of Java experience and virtually no Groovy and Grails experience.