Showing posts with label DZone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DZone. Show all posts

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.

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