Grails Introduction Slides

1. Grails 101
Lim Chee Kin
limcheekin@vobject.com
http://limcheekin.blogspot.com

2. About Me
● Moderator of the Malaysia Groovy and Grails User Group
● Involved in Grails development since version 0.6 and
developed 15 Grails plugins to date
● 10+ years experience in software development and
solution consulting for Java EE platform
● Experience spans across various industries, including
retail sector, telecommunication, heath care and
financial services industry.
● Experienced in many frameworks and web technologies,
including Java EE, SpringFramework, Hibernate, Groovy,
Grails Framework, Web Services, JQuery, JQuery UI

3. Why Grails
●
●
● To practice agile development process you
need an agile framework.

4. Inside Grails
● Seamless integration of ...
● Groovy ● Tomcat
● Java ● Ant
● SpringFramework ● Maven
● Hibernate ● Log4J
● Java EE ● H2 Database
● Sitemesh ● Quartz
● JQuery ● ... many more

5. Best Practices Support
● Convention over Configuration standard directory
structure
● Dependency Injection SpringFramework
● Model domain class View GSP Controller groovy class
● Test Automation JUnit, Spock
● Modularization plugin system
● Code Generation scaffolding
● Fast Development Cycle dynamic reloading

6. Running Grails App in 5 minutes
● Step 1: grails create-app addressbook
●
● Step 2: grails create-domain-class Person
●
● Step 3: grails generate-all Person
●
● Step 4: grails run-app

7. Step 1: grails create-app addressbook
● Created Grails Application at /opt/dev/ws/addressbook

8. Step 1: grails create-app addressbook
/addressbook
● application.properties
● grails-app/conf/ --> location of configuration artifacts
● grails-app/conf/hibernate --> optional hibernate config
● grails-app/conf/spring --> optional spring config
● grails-app/controllers/ --> location of controller artifacts
● grails-app/domain/ --> location of domain classes
● grails-app/i18n/ --> location of message bundles for i18n
● grails-app/services/ --> location of services
● grails-app/taglib/ --> location of tag libraries
● grails-app/utils/ --> location of grails specific utility classes
● grails-app/views/ --> location of views
● grails-app/views/layouts --> location of layouts
● lib/ --> jar files not available via installed plugins
● scripts/ --> scripts
● src/groovy --> optional; location for Groovy source files (of types
other than those in grails-app/*)
● src/java --> optional; location for Java source files
● test/ --> test classes
● web-app/ --> css, images, etc, etc, etc.

9. Step 2: grails create-domain-class Person
● Created file grails-app/domain/addressbook/Person.groovy
Created file test/unit/addressbook/PersonTests.groovy
●
● class Person {
● String firstName
● String lastName
● Date dateOfBirth
● Integer age
●
● static constraints = {
● firstName(nullable:true, maxSize:60)
● lastName(nullable:true, maxSize:30)
● dateOfBirth(nullable:true, maxSize:10)
● age(nullable:true)
● }
● }

10. Step 3: grails generate-all Person
● Finished generation for domain class addressbook.Person

11. Step 4: grails run-app
Server running. Browse to http://localhost:8080/addressbook

12. Step 4: grails run-app

13. Step 4: grails run-app

14. My Open Source Grails Plugins
● I contributed 15 Grails plugins out of 826
(13 Aug 2012), including:
● Grails Activiti Plugin
● http://code.google.com/p/grails-activiti-plugin/
● Grails Form Builder Plugin
● http://code.google.com/p/grails-form-builder-plugin/
● JQuery Validation UI Plugin
● http://grails.org/plugin/jquery-validation-ui
● Mahout Recommender Plugin
● https://github.com/limcheekin/mahout-recommender
● Find out more at http://goo.gl/VPVrd

15. Q&A