By the time you’ve knocked out your first few Rails apps, you’re probably not particularly excited about starting another UI from scratch. You’re still jazzed about the fact that ActiveRecord is going to save you from all the boilerplate ORM plumbing, and you’re psyched to be developing in a dynamic (and elegant and powerful) language like Ruby, but it’s hard to actually look forward to manually wiring up the relationships in the UI (again), tediously tying in Ajax in all the usual places (again), implementing live search (again), adding in pagination and sortable lists (again), and, well, you get the idea. Developing in Rails is supposed to be enjoyable, so we need something to bring the overall pleasantness of Rails into these areas of application development as well.

Enter Streamlined…

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InfoQ has just published my review of the must-read book, Groovy in Action.  If you're doing anything with Groovy, or even considering it, you really owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of this book.  If you haven't had a chance yet to check out Groovy in Action, the review should give you a good idea of what to expect from the book, and Manning has also thrown in two chapter excerpts from the book (including one on the incredibly handy Groovy JDK) to give you a feel for it first-hand.

If you notice that the review reads a bit differently than what you might typically expect, that's due to InfoQ's unique requirements for its reviews.  InfoQ reviews aim to "contain less metadata and more data, or said differently, less talk about the book and more talk of the content in the book."  The hope is that the reader learns something even while reading the review.  It seems like a cool idea to me.  So, what do you think?  Let us know in the comments over on InfoQ or below.

Next Monday (June 18th), I’ll be presenting an introduction to Grails at the Triangle Java Users Group. Scott Davis introduced TriJUG to Groovy back in April, and the response was extraordinary! Here’s your chance to see some more Groovy in action, and really focus on how Groovy (via Grails) breathes new excitement into web development on the Java platform. (My apologies for the pun.)

A local talk? I know. I know. It sounds crazy, but the commute should be quite nice.

The meeting starts at 6:30 PM. Hope to see you there!

The slides from my presentation on Grails at the Princeton JUG are now available at…

http://jasonrudolph.com/downloads/presentations/Getting_Started_with_Grails.pdf

Enjoy!