* Welcome Jon Dickinson

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

This week, we're delighted to have Jon Dickinson helping to answer questions about the new book Grails 1.1 Web Application Development.

The promotion starts Tuesday, April 14th 2009 and will end on Friday, April 17th 2009.

We'll be selecting four random posters in this forum to win a free copy of the book provided by the publisher, Packt.

Please see the Book Promotion page to ensure your best chances at winning!

Posts in this welcome thread are not eligible for the drawing.

[edited title because it is actually about Grails 1.1]

[Henry Wong]

Welcome to the ranch, Jon. And thanks for your support during this promotion.

Henry

[Mourouganandame Arunachalam]

Welcome Jon.....

[Peter Johnson]

Welcome Jon! I'm looking forward to what I imagine will be interesting discussions.

[Jon Dickinson]

Hello and thank you for having me.

Let me start with the elevator pitch for my book.

This book is about, you guessed it, web application development with Grails. The book guides the reader through the implementation of a realistic web application in Grails. The book is not a definitive reference guide to the Grails framework. Each chapter builds on the functionality of the application and introduces a few new Grails concepts. The advantage of this approach is that as the application progresses the reader gets to see a number of design decisions that have to be made on real world projects, along with the rational for those decisions. This does not mean that everyone will agree with those decisions of course!

An important element of the book is the focus on using some of the many plug-ins that are available when developing in Grails. Rather than reinventing the wheel to show off all the available features of Grails I have been able to give the reader a glimpse of the large number of plug-ins that are available for Grails. Grails is an incredibly powerful tool for developer productivity, but I see the continued success of Grails being as much dependent on the range and quality of the available plug-ins as the stability of the Grails framework itself.

One last note on the book. Due to the efficiency of the Grails development team in getting out the latest version of Grails (1.1) so quickly, and also due to my slow progress in getting the book finished, I decided to upgrade the book to version 1.1. Again this does not mean that the book is a reference guide to all of the new features available in version 1.1, but I have been able to make use of the following additions:

Read only GORM objects

Greater plug-in flexibility

Improved testing support

Template namespace

RESTful URL mapping

I look forward to hearing all your questions.

Thanks,
Jon.

[Mourouganandame Arunachalam]

Hi Jeanne:

Just curious, is the sticky icon for the welcome thread been changed or what?

[Mourouganandame Arunachalam]

Hi Jeanne:

Just curious, is the sticky icon for the welcome thread been changed or what?

Also don't know why my post getting posted twice?


Anyway, it's a welcome thread, so it will not be counted for random selection

[Devender Thareja]

Welcome Jon.

[Devender Thareja]

Welcome Jon.

[Henry Wong]

Test post --- testing as there seems to be something wrong with this topic.

Henry

[Henry Wong]

Just curious, is the sticky icon for the welcome thread been changed or what?

Let me answer this, as this topic seems to be working again.

JForum has two types of stickies. The regular one, and one for notices. In both cases, the topic is placed on top. The difference is that notice has higher priority -- meaning if both types are in the same forum, the notice sticky will be higher on the list.

For JavaRanch, a sticky topic is a rare event, so it doesn't really matter which type of sticky are used... However, as you may have noticed, the icons are different.

Henry

[Paul Yule]

Welcome to the Ranch.

[Mourouganandame Arunachalam]

Henry Wong wrote:
JForum has two types of stickies. The regular one, and one for notices. In both cases, the topic is placed on top. The difference is that notice has higher priority -- meaning if both types are in the same forum, the notice sticky will be higher on the list.

Thanks Henry for the info.