What this book covers

Chapter 1 presents a short state of the nation of Java web development and makes the case for a framework like Grails. At the end of the chapter, we will install and create a Grails project.

Chapter 2 covers the use of Grails scaffolding to generate some simple pages to manage users and roles for our application.

Chapter 3 shows how to post messages, where we write the first basic functionality for the application by allowing users to post messages that can be shared with other users. This chapter introduces a number of basic concepts for Grails development including: controllers, validation, Groovy Server Pages (GSP), and Grails Object-Relational Mapping (GORM).

Chapter 4 covers an introduction to Groovy. Here we take a short break from the Grails framework to get a better understanding of the Groovy programming language. We will cover just enough of the language to be able to proceed through the rest of the book.

Chapter 5 shows how to use our first external plug-in to add authentication and authorization to the application.

Chapter 6 covers testing, where we introduce the different levels of automated testing that are available in the Grails framework. We see how to write, unit tests with new support for testing in Grails 1.1. We also cover integration tests, and install a functional testing plug-in.

Chapter 7 covers file sharing, where we allow users to share files through the application by introducing file uploads.

Chapter 8 covers some advanced querying techniques, using Hibernate criteria support in GORM, to implement file version history.

Chapter 9 introduces Grails services in more depth. We see how to extract logic from our controllers into services to keep the application maintainable.

Chapter 10 introduces more advanced GORM techniques, such as: persisting inheritance and performing polymorphic queries to enable tagging. We also delve into GSP a bit more by using templates to encapsulate view components.

Chapter 11 covers AJAX and RIA Frameworks — Where we improve the user experience with AJAX to allow users to edit tags in-line and use the RichUI plug-in to create tag clouds and perform auto suggestion when editing tags.

Chapter 12 shows us how to use the Searchable plug-in to add a search feature to our site in a matter of minutes. We also provide an RSS feed and a REST based API for managing messages.

Chapter 13 show us how to build our own plug-in, where we follow the example of the Grails plug-in community and extract our tagging code into a plug-in that we can use on future projects.

Chapter 14 shows how to package and deploy the application to a production ready for use in a production environment. We then discuss some next steps that may be worth investigating to handle real world situations.