Jeff Brown

Grails is an Open Source, high productivity framework for building enterprise-scale web applications. It supports the development of many application types, including e-commerce web sites, content management systems (CMS), and RESTful web services.
By leveraging sensible defaults and convention-over-configuration, Grails significantly increases developer productivity. Organizations that use Grails as their application development framework realize nearly immediate gains in developer productivity and substantially reduce the time and effort to develop complex apps.

Developers will leave this session with an understanding of how to build and deploy robust web applications with Grails 3, including sample applications which may be used as a reference later.

Topics

• An Introduction To Groovy:
Groovy is the foundational language on which Grails is built. This introduction will give developers with no Groovy experience enough detail to get started with Grails.
• An Introduction To Grails 3: A high level introduction to Grails.
• Scaffolding: Demonstrate and describe very quickly getting a simple CRUD application up and running with the Grails framework.
• GORM: GORM is the powerful ORM layer pro- vided by the framework. This section will introduce GORM and several techniques for querying the database with GORM.
• REST: REST is an important part of how web application are developed and deployed to- day. Grails provides many features which greatly simplify the process of building REST applications. This section will introduce and demonstrate many of those features.

The dynamic nature of Groovy makes it a fantastic language for building dynamic applications for the Java Platform. The metaprogramming capabilities offered by the language provide everything that an application development team needs to build systems that are far more capable than their all Java counterparts. Taking advantage of Groovy's metaprogramming capabilities brings great new
possibilities that would be very difficult or just plain impossible to write with Java alone. Building Domain Specific Languages in Groovy is easy to do once a team has a good understanding of the
Metaobject-Protocol (MOP) and the method dispatch mechanisms used by the Groovy runtime environment.

This session will cover in detail a number of advanced metaprogramming concepts in Groovy. The discussion will cover using dynamic method interception, metaclass customizations and Groovy's
Metaobject-Protocol (MOP) to build flexible applications in Groovy including implementing a Domain Specific Language (DSL).

For some web applications it does not make sense to have 1 monolithing process which handles all of the requirements of the application. More and more often Grails is showing up in microservice architectures where instead of building 1 monolithing web application which is responsible for all of the pieces of the application puzzle, microservice applications are being assembled which collectively solve the requirements of the larger application. Grails is very well suited for this type of architecture. A microservice based architecture can result in applications which are easier to build, easier to test, easier to extend and are easier to adapt to changing business requirements.

This session will cover a lot of ground related to implementing a microservice based architecture on top of the Grails framework.