Thursday, March 19, 2009

Suggestions for Grails Refcard?

You may recall a recent poll on DZone where they were looking for input on what to cover next in their Refcardz project. Grails ended up at the top of that poll, by a very healthy margin (roughly 50% more votes than the #2 choice: Maven). The folks at DZone actually listen to their customers (unlike some other companies we know) and are now working on a Grails Refcard!

I have several of these cards and they are a great resource. I am very excited to see that their will soon be one on Grails! (Hopefully this May.) I'm also pretty excited that I get to write it. But these are a community resource so I am hoping to get some community involvement.

So, what would you most like to see in a Grails Refcard? What kind of things would you turn to a cheat sheet for when you're working on a Grails application? Are there features or syntax that you find yourself Googling for often? Now's your chance to get those covered on this handy reference card.

Post your wish list in a comment here or on the Grails mailing list.

Thanks for your help!
Dave

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

All the things showing up on the left frame in the Grails Reference docs: http://grails.org/doc/1.1/ref/menu.html

Kico (Henrique Lobo Weissmann) said...

I really whould like to see a Gant refcard. That's because is a great tool used by Grails that usually is completely rejected!

Hamlet D'Arcy said...

I think the important part is to make it detailed enough to be useful to the experienced Grails user but not too complex for the newcomer. I would ask yourself 2 questions:

1) What are the things I always have to look up? What pieces of syntax do I forget frequently? The 2nd Ed of DGtoGrails is a good resource to comb through, especially highlighting things you didn't know about or syntax requirements the type checker doesn't catch.

2) What are the things you have explained to your co-workers in the last year? What didn't they know about?

I would ignore the question of what does a Grails newbie want to know. There are screencasts and quick starts for that. A good refcard means it has a home on the desk of developers and can be a quick reference guide.

Jeroen Gordijn said...

Hi Dave,

great that you are writing this ref card. I would like to see the constraints on it.

good luck,
Jeroen

Uysal KARA said...

Hi Dave

I'd like to see a section on effective unit testing of various artifacts(domain objects controllers taglibs etc)

Deepak Mittal said...

Besides constraints which has already been mentioned, I would also like to see different ways of defining domain relationships.