Tuesday, June 30, 2009

It's Official: Grails has a DZone Refcard!

The Grails Refcard is now available for download at http://refcardz.dzone.com

Writing a refcard was a bit more challenging than I thought it would be. The main difficulty being determining what it should have in it. I put the question out here and on the Grails mailing lists and got some good ideas but no help in narrowing it down. Should it be solely a reference for experienced Grails users? An easy getting started guide for new Grails users? Should it just be a copy of the docs in a smaller font?!

I leaned more towards it being a reference for existing users but I know there are still many poor souls out there who don't yet know how much better their jobs could be with Grails. So, I settled on a hybrid approach. The first section is a brief introduction to Grails and some of it's key benefits. I could have done so much more here but hopefully it's enough to convince those not yet using Grails to take a second look. The rest of the card is dedicated to some of the concepts and details that I and others I know of have had to lookup most frequently. I know I didn't hit everyone's key points but hopefully I covered enough of them to make it useful.

Download it and take a look. The download is free and feedback is always welcome.

I would like to thank the folks at DZone for giving me this opportunity and even more for their support of the G3 community with first the Groovy Refcard and now the Grails Refcard. There's no Griffon Refcard yet, but they do listen so send them an email to let them know you'd like to see one or better yet, offer to write it. It's a fun and challenging experience.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi i'm just new to the grails/groovy world, and i was wondering what plugin to choose for enabling ajax on the GSPs. Thanks.

Dave Klein said...

Hi Anonymous,

Or can I call you Anon for short. To use the Ajax tags that come with Grails all you have to do is tell Grails which JS library you are using with <g:javascript> tag. Like this: <g:javascript library="prototype" /> Put that in the <head> of your page and you're ready to go. More info can be found here: http://www.grails.org/Ajax

If you want more heavy-duty Ajax features, then I highly recommend the Grails-UI plugin (http://www.grails.org/plugin/grails-ui)

Hope that helps,
Dave

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much Dave, it helped !