Advanced Grails

Many demonstrations of new technology focus on the shiny turnkey features – “Look at what this thing magically does for you out of the box!” While Grails has many gee-whiz scaffolding features, it is a framework first. A framework should “make easy things easy and hard things possible.” (Apologies to the Perl community for co-opting their battle cry.) This talk focuses on the hard things that are possible with Grails, but require just a bit of glue code to implement.

Grails does a great job making 1:M relationships turnkey. Relating two tables is as simple as adding a line of code to each class. The web scaffolding generates combo-boxes automagically. M:M relationships, on the other hand, require a bit of elbow grease. We'll explore 1:M and M:M in Grails and how to best present them via the web interface.

We'll also look at things like how to best handle file uploads, how to manage user authentication, and even how to incorporate a Captcha into your forms. None of these are impossible, but each requires just a few additional strategic lines of code to handle.

About Scott Davis

Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.

Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.

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