Pragmatic Grails Book in the Works!

I've always been impressed with the Pragmatic Programmers: as software artisans, as writers and as publishers. From a developer's perspective, you just can't beat the Pragmatic Programmers books. Not only do you have books written by developers for developers, you have books published by developers for developers, and often you have books edited by developers for developers.

When it comes to Groovy books, again, the Pragmatic Programmers shine. There are several good Groovy books out there. (Who can ever forget GinA?) But if I had to be stranded on a desert island with only one Groovy book (sounds kind of fun actually... can I bring my family?), it would have to be either Programming Groovy or Groovy Recipes, both Pragmatic titles.

All that to say that I am thrilled to announce that the Pragmatic Programmers will be coming out with their first Grails book! I don't know what it will be called or when it will ship, but it will be a "quick start guide," aimed at meeting the needs of all those new converts you are all out there making, as well as the untold millions of Spring users who are only a single Graeme Rocher demo away from becoming Grails users.

Another really cool thing for me about this new book is that I get to write it! I am almost as excited by this opportunity as I am overwhelmed by the responsibility. It is a big challenge, but I will do my best, and with God's help we'll soon have a book that can help rescue all those poor developers who are still suffering with Struts and JSF.

Another side benefit: with this task along with GroovyMag, I think I finally have a good excuse for my infrequent blog entries. :-)

I want to give a big Thank You to the folks at the Pragmatic Programmers for putting their trust in me and for their support behind the Groovy and Grails community.

Uber-GenerateAll

With the big news today in the 2G community, this important tidbit might be left behind, but if you're watching the Grails Jira, and who isn't doing that?,  then you will have seen that Marcel Overdijk's Uber-Generate-All script will be included in Grails 1.04 due out later this week! (See GRAILS-2946)

Now, on a new Grails project, after creating a bunch of domain classes, maybe fiddling around with constraints and such with the scaffolding turned on, and generally getting things the way you want them, you can just give this command: grails generate-all "*" and all your controllers and views will be generated in one fell swoop!  How cool is that?  

This can be a timesaver in any project but it is really slick when giving demos of Grails, which is something we should all be doing more of  :)

So, in case this news doesn't make as big a splash in the 2G Community as the SpringSource acquisition, I just want to say "Thanks!" and "Good Job!" to Marcel for coming up with this idea and to Peter Ledbrook for getting it into Grails.  These guys are both Groovy Award winners and here's one more reason why!