Part 4. Advanced Grails

In part 4, we’ll introduce you to some of the most advanced features that Grails has to offer. You’ll learn about performance tuning, legacy integration, database transactions, custom build processes, and even how to develop and publish your own plugins.

Chapter 13 will take you on into GORM—the Grails object relational mapping implementation. You’ll learn a lot about less-frequently used modeling options that can be real time-savers. You’ll also explore caching, performance profiling, and some comprehensive legacy-integration examples.

Chapter 14 takes you into the heart of Spring integration in Grails. You’ll learn all the different ways of defining and interacting with Spring-managed beans in your application. We’ll then tour transactions—how they work and what they’re useful for.

Build infrastructure is an important part of professional software development, and chapter 15 takes you deep inside the Grails build system. You’ll start by learning how to add your own Grails commands. We’ll then teach you how to integrate your Grails build with both Ant and Maven, the two most commonly used build tools in the Java space. Then, we’ll give you strategies for handling data migration as your application grows, demonstrating how third-party plugins can help.

Finally, we’ll conclude with a detailed look at how you can develop your own Grails plugins. You’ll learn about the plugin lifecycle and how you can augment Grails with new features. You’ll also learn how to publish your new plugin to the Grails plugin repository for others to share.

By the end of part 4, you’ll have taken your Grails skills to a whole new level. You’ll be ready to write the next uber-scalable, world-changing Web 2.0 social networking application. Remember us when you hit the big time.