Beginning Groovy and Grails (eBook)

Jim Shingler is a VP of Application Development for J. P. Morgan Chase. The focus of his career has been using cutting-edge technology to develop IT solutions for the banking, insurance, financial services, and manufacturing industries. He has 16 years of large-scale Java experience and significant experience in distributed and relational technologies.

Contents at a Glance 5
Contents 6
Foreword 13
About the Authors 15
About the Technical Reviewer 16
Acknowledgments 17
Introduction 19
Who This Book Is For 20
How This Book Is Structured 20
Prerequisites 22
Downloading the Code 22
Contacting the Authors 22
Introduction to Groovy 23
Groovy Language Features 24
Groovy Installation 24
Groovy by Example 25
Summary 31
Groovy Basics 32
Scripts 32
Assertions 38
Strings 39
Methods and Closures 44
Collections 48
Regular Expressions 54
Operators 61
Summary 66
More Advanced Groovy 67
Groovy Unit Testing 67
Working with XML 70
Generating Text with Templates 74
Expandos 77
Meta Object Protocol 78
Domain- Specific Languages 80
Summary 81
Introduction to Grails 82
What Is Grails? 83
Grails Architecture 87
Installing Grails 89
Collab- Todo Application 89
Getting Started with Scaffolding 90
Understanding the Scaffolding Process 93
Summary 122
Building the User Interface 123
Starting with the End in Mind 123
Making the Topbar Functional 140
Testing 144
Externalizing Strings 157
Errors and Validation 159
Flash and Flash Messages 162
Controlling the Application 166
Creating an Audit Log Using Action Interceptors 175
Using Filters 177
Summary 181
Building Domains and Services 183
GORM 183
Collab- Todo’s Domain 184
Creating Domain Objects 186
Validation 204
Querying the Database 212
Database Migration 224
Services 226
Summary 230
Security in Grails 232
What Is Security? 233
An Overview of Grails Security Solutions 238
Custom Security Implementation 239
JSecurity 250
CAS 260
Spring Security ( aka Acegi Security) 263
Summary 272
Web 2.0—Ajax and Friends 273
Advanced Presentation Components 273
Tag Libraries 290
Ajax in Grails 293
RSS Feeds 307
Summary 309
Web Services 311
RESTful Web Services 312
RESTful in Grails 314
Summary 325
Reporting 326
The Report 326
Overview of the Reporting Function 327
Reporting Tools 329
Creating the To- Do Report 331
The Report Tag 338
The ReportController and the ReportService 341
Tying It All Together 347
The Report List 349
An Alternate Approach 350
Summary 350
Batch Processing 352
Installing the Quartz Plug- in 352
Creating a Job 353
Building a Batch- Reporting Facility 355
Summary 366
Deploying and Upgrading 367
Deploying Grails Applications 367
Automating Tasks with Gant 377
Upgrading Grails Applications 379
Summary 380
Alternative Clients 381
Overview 381
Setup 382
Command- Line Scripts 383
Rich Groovy Client 393
Summary 412
Index 413