Ajax development with the Yahoo! UI Library and Grails

Yahoo! is a company that eats its own dog food. They open sourced the Ajax code that drives many of their own websites, including their eponymous homepage, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! News. Come see first hand how the various pieces of the library work together as a seamless whole.

We'll look at some of the everyday useful widgets like the onscreen JavaScript logger (which effectively brings Log4J-style logging to JavaScript) and the calendar components. We'll see how event handling is managed in a cross-brower fashion. We'll look at tabbed interfaces, multi-level menus, and panels and dialog boxes that end up making your website look more like a OS-level desktop than a traditional webpage.

The YUI library is included with the Grails web framework. It certainly works in all of the major frameworks as well, but the easy bootstrapping of Grails combined with the power of YUI library makes for the quickest way to get started with a minimum of hassle. No previous Groovy or Grails experience is required, so come to learn a little about all of these. Any experience JEE developer will feel right at home since Grails uses Spring and Hibernate under the covers.

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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