Original Source

Meera Subbarao writes about her latest testing of Groovy/Grails support with NetBeans 6.5. You may remember Meera from a previous post (Highlights of Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional). She notes that this particular test began as a means to corroborate what Beginning Groovy and Grails proposes: Groovy and Grails increase your productivity. But to have a good level of productivity you require tools, given that Geertjan’s NetBeans to Grails guide was posted during the weekend, she decided to give it a try. In her own words:

After having read the book Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional, I was wondering if it was ever going to be as simple as a few clicks in any IDE for Grails development. Just yesterday, I read an article by Geertjan Wielenga(who is also my colleague at Javalobby/DZone) about how to get started with Grails in NetBeans IDE 6.5 in 5 simple steps. I had worked with NetBeans quite a lot for EJB3 development but I had never used it for either Groovy or Grails; the choice earlier was always Eclipse IDE.

I first followed the Book Demo and later moved to a more real life example. This was a litmus test which I thought NetBeans had to pass for developers to continue using the same for Groovy/Grails development. The example in the book has a few relationships; which is what we would generally have in any enterprise application.

I was able to create all the domain classes, controllers, manage relationships without ever leaving the IDE. Creating a Domain class or even a Controller, is as simple as right clicking on the appropriate nodes and providing meaningful names. The IDE creates the skeleton classes; we need to provide the meat within

If you are a Groovy or a Grails fan, download the latest version of NetBeans and give it a try. You can develop, test and run your Grails application without ever opening a command window. The Groovy editor has basic coloring, formatting and bracket completion. The GSP editor has coloring, highlighting of GSP tags, expressions and scriptlets. You can mix and match Java and Groovy as well.

Tags: Grails, Meera Subbarao, NetBeans

Original Source

Meera Subbarao has written a short summary on Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional, a book we previously reported was about to hit the streets a month ago. Meera has written many book reviews and summaries before (you may find some of them at java.dzone previously known as JavaLobby), also Groovy is no unknown topic to her. She writes:

The main highlights of this book are:

• Full coverage of basic Grails features of scaffolding, domains, controllers, services, and Groovy Server pages
• Tackles common web application challenges such as security, Ajax, web services, reporting, batch processing, and deployment
• Includes a Swing desktop client built in Groovy that integrates with the application using the exposed web services

Who should read this book
This book is for Java developers and organizations looking to become more productive by taking advantage of dynamic languages and solid agile web frameworks while lever-aging current investments in infrastructure, code, and education in the Java platform. It is for those who want to build internal applications and mission-critical, Internet-facing applications.
This book does not assume the reader has a strong Java or Groovy background, so those familiar with other dynamic languages like Perl, Ruby, Python, or PHP will find this a great source for investigating the Groovy and Grails alternative.

How This Book Is Organized
In this book, you’ll explore how to build command-line, Swing, and web applications using the Groovy language and the Grails web framework. The step-by-step approach will take you from a simple to a complex and fully featured Web 2.0 application. Chapters 1–3 provide a basic Groovy language primer, while Chapters 4–12 explain how to build and deploy web applications using Grails. The final chapter explains how to use Groovy and Swing to build a desktop client that interacts with the Grails web application.

As with other books offered by the publisher, this one includes source code you may download and play with. The official book’s website is http://www.beginninggroovyandgrails.com.

Tags: Book, Grails, Meera Subbarao, Summary