Part 2: Core Grails

In part 1, we gave you a whirlwind introduction to both the core parts of Grails and the underlying Groovy language that powers it. In part 2, we’ll start a more thorough exploration of the three core parts of the Grails ecosystem: models, controllers, and views.

In chapter 3, we’ll look at domain modeling—the heart of any Grails application. You’ll learn about saving and updating domain classes, explore the many faces of validation, and cover all basic relationships for domain classes (1:1, 1:m, m:n).

Chapter 4 will put your modeling skills to work by taking you through the numerous query mechanisms that Grails offers for searching your domain model. We’ll also investigate Grails’ fantastic scaffolding features, which allow you to build a functional UI in record time.

By the time we reach chapter 5, you’ll be ready to explore some of the web-oriented features of Grails. In particular, how you can route a user around the different features in your application using Grails controllers. We’ll also cover binding data from web forms, write a request filter, and even create some custom URL mappings to add user-friendly permalinks to your application.

In chapter 6, we’ll turn our attention to the user interface components of a Grails application, exploring Grails tags for UI construction. We’ll show you how to quickly add a consistent and sophisticated look and feel to your applications, and even how to build custom skins for your application. Finally, we’ll introduce Grails’ AJAX support, and show you how to add some slick animations to your applications.

In chapter 7, we’ll teach you how to build robust tests for your newly developed code, so you can make sure everything works properly before your code is deployed. We’ll start with unit tests for all the basic Grails artifacts you’ve developed so far. We’ll then build on those fine-grained testing skills with the broader ideas of integration and functional testing. By the end of chapter 7, testing will be your middle name.

Once you’ve finished this part of the book, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of all the basics of Grails and be well on your way to becoming a productive Grails developer. In part 3, we’ll introduce you to more sophisticated Grails features that will really make your application ready for production.