During this Groovy and Grails Primer course, you will become familiar with the fantastic, exciting features offered by the Groovy language and the Grails framework. You will learn how to integrate Grails wth existing Java Enterprise services, databases and web apps and how to leverage Groovy's additional power to Java, and how to make writing shell and build scripts easy with Groovy's powerful processing primitives, OO abilities and an Ant DSL. You will learn how Groovy supports Domain-Specific Languages and other compact syntax so your code becomes easy to read and to maintain, how to simplify testing by supporting unit testing and mocking out-of-the-box.

In addition, you will learn how to integrate Grails with existing frameworks, such as Spring and Hibernate, Java Enterprise services, databases and web applications and how to use a blended approach mixing static and dynamically typed code to maximise the scalability of your code base.

Come to this course to experience the power of Grails 1.0 and Groovy 1.5!

This 1-day Groovy and Grails course has been developed by Grails Project lead and former Skills Matter CTO Graeme Rocher and is being kept up to date with all the latest developments by Steven DeVijver, co-founder of the Grails project.

The Groovy Tour

• Groovy for Java Developers - The Basics
  • The syntax similarities
  • New language constructs
  • Groovy Strings
  • Closures
• What makes Groovy tick?
  • Groovy dynamism
  • Meta-programming
  • Embedding Groovy

Getting started with Grails

• The Grails Introduction
  • Background, foundations and motivations
  • Current project status
  • Why choose Grails for your project?
• Grails Basics
  • The Project Infrastructure
  • Running Grails scripts
  • Creating a basic CRUD application

The Grails Domain Model

• Understanding domain models
  • Domain-driven development with Grails
  • Applying domain constraints
  • Defining domain relationships
• Working with persistence methods
  • Saving, deleting and updating
  • Using dynamic finders
  • Advanced querying with criteria and HQL

The Web Layer

• Orchestrating requests with controllers
  • Rendering responses
  • Handling data binding and validation
• Groovy views with GSP
  • Supplying the model
  • Logic, iteration and filtering
  • Advanced site layouts with SiteMesh
• Separating logic and content with Tag libraries
  • Dynamic tag library basics
  • Logical and iterative tags

Java Integration

• Java Enterprise Integration
  • Packaging and deployment onto JEE containers
  • Using EJB3 entities with Grails
  • Grails and the Servlet environment
• Technology stack integration
  • Wiring it all together with the Spring DSL
  • Scripting Hibernate with GORM