| | |  | Software Engineering | Home » » » The Definitive Guide to Grails (Expert's Voice in Web Development) | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | The rise of Ruby on Rails has signified a huge shift in how we build web applications today; it is a fantastic framework with a growing community. There is, however, space for another such framework that integrates seamlessly with Java. Thousands of companies have invested in Java, and these same companies are losing out on the benefits of a Rails–like framework. Enter Grails. Grails is not just a Rails clone. It aims to provide a Rails–like environment that is more familiar to Java developers and employs idioms that Java developers are comfortable using, making the adjustment in mentality to a dynamic framework less of a jump. The concepts within Grails, like interceptors, tag libs, and Groovy Server Pages (GSP), make those in the Java community feel right at home. Grails’ foundation is on solid open source technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh, which gives it even more potential in the Java space: Spring provides powerful inversion of control and MVC, Hibernate brings a stable, mature object relational mapping technology with the ability to integrate with legacy systems, and SiteMesh handles flexible layout control and page decoration. Grails complements these with additional features that take advantage of the coding–by–convention paradigm such as dynamic tag libraries, Grails object relational mapping, Groovy Server Pages, and scaffolding. Graeme Rocher, Grails lead and founder, and Jeff Brown bring you completely up–to–date with their authoritative and fully comprehensive guide to the Grails framework. You’ll get to know all the core features, services, and Grails extensions via plug–ins, and understand the roles that Groovy and Grails are playing in the changing Web. What you’ll learn - Discover how the Web is changing and the role the Groovy language and its Rails framework play
- Get to know the Grails Project and its domains, services, filters, controllers, views, testing, and plug–ins
- Experience the availability of plug–ins for Rich Client and Ajax, web services, performance/utilities, scheduling, security, functionality, and even Persistence
- See how Grails works with other frameworks like Spring, Wicket, Hibernate, and more
- Create custom plug–ins in Grails
Who this book is for This book is for everyone who is looking for a more agile approach to web development with a dynamic scripting language such as Groovy. This includes a large number of Java developers who have been enticed by the productivity gains seen with frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, JRuby on Rails, etc. The Web and its environment is a perfect fit for easily adaptable and concise languages such as Groovy and Ruby, and there is huge interest from the developer community in general to embrace these languages. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Graeme Rocher | | Paperback:
| 648 pages | | Publisher:
| Apress | | Publication Date:
| January 14, 2009 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1590599950 | | Product Length:
| 9.2 inches | | Product Width:
| 7.0 inches | | Product Height:
| 1.3 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.9 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.2 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.1 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.6 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.85 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 10 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 10 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 It's based on Grails 1.1Dec 31, 2010
By P. M Palmer
"Phil"
This book is OK. But since it is written to grails 1.1, it is way out of date. The online resources are more accurate.
4 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Definitely a definitive guide to Grails - read the book and become Grails expertMay 24, 2009
By Jacek Laskowski
The Definitive Guide to Grails, Second Edition (aka DGG2) is no doubt the best Java book I've ever read, and for what it's worth mentioning I read it from cover to cover. It was not only because it was about Grails I meant to get skilled at, but also for its comprehensive English language. I took the liberty of writing complete reviews of each chapter on my blog, so it kept me busy almost 3 months to digest all the Grails goodies Graeme and James collected in their book. Although it was my second book about Grails (after "Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional") I couldn't stop reading it. The more I read the often I asked myself why it took me so long to appreciate Grails features. The book covers the features of Grails 1.1 which was in beta while the book was written yet the material didn't get outdated with its final release. The authors made all the efforts to ensure the book is complete and up-to-date even though Grails 1.1 was not available at that time yet.
I don't want to spoil your reading of the book and its unique style of explaining Grails features by its authors, so if you're like me chasing the simplicity of Grails and trying it out in your projects that's definitely a book you have to read. There are almost 650 pages divided into 17 chapters and one appendix about Groovy - the language of Grails. You shouldn't afford yourself just to read it once - you might easily fail to notice all the gems presented in this book. There are so many that even reading it twice might not be enough. I had a pleasure to read it once, underline all the stuff I considered useful and used it in the reviews afterwards. All in all I think I read it a couple of times and I always found something new I'd missed earlier. I must admit that after a few weeks I was even completely fed up with Grails as there were too much to digest. It reminded me of reading a science book with lots of equations, examples and their explanations - even if I enjoyed it and could read it over night, the best bet to not get swamped was to read it chapter by chapter or even section by section and do the samples myself. DGG2 was not different. It contains the gory details of Grails presented by its project lead and its project member, so who else could bring you the latest stuff right and in details?
It's definitely a definitive guide to Grails. I don't think Grails could have been presented better than what you can find in the book. I'm sure many could share my view that one can't call himself a Grails expert unless (s)he has read the book. You can't simply let yourself miss the pleasure of reading the book. It's like you never programmed with Java IDE and be once presented with its features one by one in a very organized manner. You'll surely get astonished how much you missed for so long. So will happen to you after reading this book. No matter whether you're a Grails developer now or want to become one soon, you'll come across many ground-breaking solutions of Grails in this book. It is highly recommended for anyone who keeps looking for the Holy Grail of the web application frameworks. It could just be Grails after all.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Interesting and comprehensiveMar 08, 2009
By Trevor Burnham
This is one of the best-written programming books I've come across. It covers every aspect of creating a Grails application. Although this is a thick book, and not a "put together a Grails app in a few hours" book, it nonetheless manages to keep a brisk pace, conveying plenty of useful information without getting mired in detail.
As a bonus, the book features an appendix that covers the basics of the Groovy programming language. However, if you plan to develop in Groovy on a regular basis, you might want to consider adding Groovy in Action to your library.
[Edit: Grails 1.1 has been released since this book came out. The changes to the API are pretty minor, so this book still stands out as an excellent introduction. However, Grails in Action (which I haven't read yet) promises to be a more up-to-date primer.]
Standing on the shoulder of the giantJan 08, 2011
By L. Zhang
"procthink"
The book is thorough, and detailed in terms of its revealing the structure of Grails framework. The more important part to me, however, is its detailed explanation of integration of Grails to Spring, which is lacking in other Grails books (they have their own merits of course). In addtion to many parts of the book that relate to Spring, one whole chapter (chapter 16) is devoted to Grails as related to Spring. "Spring is the engine that underpins Grails."(p.487). "all Grails objects are essentially Spring beans that have been configured for autowiring by name" (p.489). Thus, in the place where Spring as a a dependency injection container uses XML (other format too) to configure and wire together dependencies,"Grails makes some decisions based on the conventions in the project and automatically configures Spring using sensible defaults.(p.489). Grails stands on the shoulder of the giant by using conventions over configurations. Grails uses groovy's dynamic features to dynamically inject dependencies.
Then the books goes into details about "The BeanBuilder DSL", about how to define spring beans, and how to overrite Spring beans, and finally present a case of "Spring in Action" on Integrating JMS with Spring JMS.
If there is any complaints, I would say that the chapter on Spring is too late and too brief on Spring itself. If we all agree that Grails is a dynamic version of Spring, then readers without training in Spring would benefit a lot from a more detailed presentation of the spirit of Spring - a framework that manages an oceans of objects by going beyong concepts of classes, concepts of interfacts and ending up with a combination of interfaces combined with factory patterns. To this effect, I think it's good to learn something from Pro Spring 2.5 where a simple Hello World program is used to reveal the overwhelming beauty of Spring the famework.
 Very good bookSep 25, 2010
By happylearner
Very good book!
It covers lot of good details, and cover a lot of Grails topics & features through many pages in the book. The MVC and Web Services chapters are great! The GORM chapter should go more into detailed about the one-to-many and many-to-many with how the indices are linked together from tables to tables. Also there should be some discussion about the Grails/Groovy performance in general and GORM performance in doing different types of queries. Besides the myth that we can develop applications with just couple hours, designing a workable and reasonablly comprehensive web portal, would actually still take weeks or months of design, development and testing. But yes, coming from C, C++, and Java background, I do appreciate the DSL MVC framework that Grails and RoR have done. I say it does save 60% of my development time, especially I can pull in so many open-source libraries as well as my useful tool libraries that I have develop over the years at no times at all. I would not want to do anything in Java or C that I think I can do in Groovy & Grails (I prefer Groovy-n-Grails over RoR).
The only remaining issue is the performance aspect of it. I think Groovy/Grails need to have a very good performance, something close to Java, to make it a dominant choice for all, not just for applications that don't concern about performance. At the end of the day, the performance will be a big consideration factor for any reasonable commercial deployment.
See all 10 customer reviews on Amazon.com
| | |
|
