8.5. GrailsUI makeover

With our full-text search capability in place, it’s time to polish our UI. There are numerous Grails plugins for adding more UI sizzle to your app, but one of the most popular (and easy to use) is the GrailsUI plugin.

GrailsUI is a wrapper for YahooUI (YUI)—the poplar JavaScript UI toolkit from Yahoo!—but the plugin’s Grails integration is what makes it so attractive. It includes everything from tooltips to date pickers, rich-text editors, dialog boxes, data tables, and even Ajax autocomplete fields—all with fantastic Grails integration to make consuming the service straightforward. Our goals for Hubbub are modest: some tooltips, rich-text editing, a nicer date picker, and some fancy Ajax autocomplete fields.