Developing Web Applications with Grails

As I have recently released software books reviews I believe I have finally improved my skills also when working with pure front end (html, css) of web application. As I also mentioned in the previous post, I plan to write series of posts explaining development work on the 'software books reviews' site. I hope my experience will be useful for additional developers. As I am coming from back-end Java development, while developing my first Grails applications the hardest part for me was HTML, css, layout... I believe posts I will write will also help other back-end developers to write web sites using Grails.

I plan to write at least one post per week (till there is enough to write). I do not plan to cover basics like how to install grails or how to generate applications. There are already lot of articles covering these topics. But I hope posts will be clear enough so even beginners will be able to understand them.

Lets go to the first topic :)

So if you are reading this probably you want to write web applications using Grails. Let us see what topics one needs to cover to write web application:

• It is necessary to create nice front-end (HTML, css styles, layouts)  (disclaimer: I don't claim that I am making nice front-ends :) )
• It is necessary to implement business logic - behavior of the application
• Probably it is necessary to include security into application
• It is necessary to store data into database
• And very often it is necessary to provide some additional features that are not directly connected with business logic but in these days are more or less "must have". Obvious feature are RSS feeds.

Grails can help us with most of these requirements while hiding most of the complexity from us. Thanks to grails the most complex things are hidden from us but we still have access to them.

Domain objects - domain objects of course describe domain of our business logic. They are automatically persisted and loaded from the database. This means that database schema generation is something we don't need to think about most of the time.

Services - provide functionality that is not part of the domain objects. In services you include functions that are not naturally fitting into domain objects. Further on services handle transactional behavior for you. You can configure them with simple flag.

Plugins - Grails has excellent system of plugins. As we don't want to reinvent wheel we can reuse what is already implemented for us. Plugins will provide us with security, nice front-end components, RSS generation....

Sitemesh - is decorator engine supported by Grails to support view layouts. I am using it only on the basic level but even in such scenario it is very useful.

So these are some basics that will help us to make developing web application fun and fast.  Using those features we will go through example implementation of the software books reviews.

In the next post I will describe how I start project, and at least what are my basic first steps. I don't claim that it is the correct way but for me it turned out to be good.

Some advertisement: if you are reading software related books please be so kind to post review or link to review on the software books reviews.