Found: the Holy Grail of JavaTM Developer Productivity -
Dec 14th, 21:16 UTC
The Definitive Guide to Grails Berkeley, CA--14 December 2006--Apress, Inc. publishes The Definitive Guide to Grails, written by Grails project founder and lead Graeme Rocher. (ISBN: 1-59059-758-3, 365 pages, December 2006 Price: $39.99.)
"The Definitive Guide to Grails is another great achievement of Graeme Rocher ... and from whose mouth would you best learn how to ride such a great horse than by the horse's mouth itself?", observes Guillaume Laforge and Dierk König, Groovy project committers and writers of the foreword to The Definitive Guide to Grails.
Ruby on Rails is hot, but it seems that more recent noise from the Java community has been focused on Groovy and its framework, Grails. Taking inspiration from innovative frameworks like Ruby on Rails, or the likes of Django or TurboGears, Grails makes simple things simpler, harder things possible, and brings back the fun of creating web applications. Continuing to affirm the hype, Guillaume Laforge and Dierk König, remark "Grails definitely has an ambitious name for being the Holy Grail all application developers have sought so far. But more than a mere ambition, Grails fulfills its promises by letting you be more productive than you could have ever thought possible."
The Grails Framework is an open source, lightweight, agile Web development framework that leverages Groovy, an open source, lightweight, agile and dynamic Java-based scripting language, and complements Java web development. Grails is the ideal framework for developing in the web tier for Java developers and exemplifies the power of the Groovy language and its APIs.
The Definitive Guide to Grails covers Groovy language fundamentals, Grails project infrastructure, the application domain, scaffolding, testing, controllers, Grails Server Pages (GSP), Ajax, Services and Jobs, and Java integration. Moreover, this book takes you through the Grails development life cycle, including its project infrastructure, screen generation, full automatic object mapping to relational database systems, and a flexible, easy-to-use web layer. It also demonstrates how Grails complements Java web development. Topics include creating domain classes in the Java platform while still accessing advanced features like dynamic persistent methods, using Grails controllers to call business logic written in the Java specification, and testing your Java application logic using Grails test cases.
Grails project founder and lead and author of The Definitive Guide to Grails, Graeme Rocher, explains why he wrote the book: "I wrote this book to spread the news that there are robust, dynamic alternatives to traditional Java web application frameworks and to push forward the idea of using dynamic and statically typed code to complement each other where appropriate. Groovy is an incredibly powerful language and until recently much of its power was largely undocumented. The development of Grails provides a shining example of what Groovy is capable of when its full range of capabilities is harnessed."
The Definitive Guide to Grails is available as part of the `Join the Apress Open Source Lightweight Java Revolution!' special offer: `Buy 2 Apress eBooks, Get 1 FREE' until 31st December 2006: http://www.apress.com/promo/javabundle.html
About the author, Graeme Rocher:
Graeme Rocher is a software architect and chief technology officer at SkillsMatter. He started his career in the e-learning sector as part of a team developing scalable enterprise learning management systems based on J2EE technology. He later branched into the digital TV arena where he faced increasingly complex requirements that required an agile approach as the ever-changing and young iDTV platforms evolved. This is where Graeme was first exposed to Groovy, and he began combining Groovy with Cocoon to deliver dynamic multichannel content management systems targeted at digital TV platforms.
Benefiting from this taster of what Groovy had to offer, Graeme utilized his skills in his next role at a company called KnowledgePool to produce a rapid e-learning development toolkit, Originate, that incorporated Groovy as the
glue language to bring together a diverse range of technologies required to make the product work (from VB and Microsoft Word to XSLT, the JavaScriptTM language, and XSL-FO). Soon 80% of all e-learning work produced by KnowledgePool was using the Groovy-based technology to deliver bespoke e-learning projects.
Seeing an increasing trend for web delivery of services and the complexity this brought, Graeme embarked on another project to simplify this and founded Grails, a framework with the essence of Ruby on Rails, but targeted at tight Java integration. Graeme is the current project lead of Grails and is a member of the Groovy JSR-241 executive committee.
In his current role as CTO at SkillsMatter, a company specializing in open source training, Graeme is in charge of the company's courseware development strategy and general technical direction. As part of this role, he actively works with a wide range of professionals from the open source community and speaks at industry conferences whenever possible on subjects related to Groovy, Grails, and dynamic languages in Java.
(Submitted by Stephanie Parker of Apress Inc)
|
