Book Image

Grails 1.1 Web Application Development

By : Jon Dickinson
Book Image

Grails 1.1 Web Application Development

By: Jon Dickinson

Overview of this book

Web development is trickyóeven a simple web application has a number of context changes ready to trip up the unwary. Grails takes the everyday pain out of web application development, allowing us to focus on delivering real application logic and create seamless experiences that will address the needs of our users. This book will take the pain out of Grails by showing you exactly how to build a web application with a minimum of fuss. With this book, even if you are new to Grails, you will be up and running before you know it. You will be able to code faster and your code will be better. This clear and concise book is packed with examples and clear instructions to help you build your first Grails application and gives you the skills to speed up your application development by adding a different angle for learning about the topic. After a brief introduction to the dynamic JVM-based Groovy programming language, which teaches you enough about Groovy to understand the relationship between Grails and the Groovy scripting language, it shows how to use Grails and a number of key plug-ins to deliver valuable web applications. It also takes you through creating, developing, testing, and deploying an example team collaboration application in Grails. Using an incremental and iterative approach you will learn how to build a basic web application with secure authentication and different levels of authorization. You will learn how to handle file upload allowing users to share files. Some advanced features of object-oriented persistence will be introduced through adding tags for messages and files to giving users a robust categorization system. You will then build on the basic application to enhance the user experience through AJAX and the RichUI plug-in. You will take a further step into the world of Web 2.0 by adding an RSS feed and a REST service to the application. Once the entire application is up and running, you will learn how to create your own plug-in for tagging. Finally, you will learn how to deploy this application to a production environment.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Grails 1.1 Web Application Development
Credits
About the author
Acknowledgement
About the reviewers
Preface

Functional testing In Grails


There are a few plug-ins for Grails that allow you to write functional tests. These plug-ins will drive the user interface of an application and verify the information that is displayed to the user. The one we will look at is called Grails Functional Testing. It provides a builder DSL over the HtmlUnit (http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/) framework.

Benefits of functional testing in Grails

As you will see shortly, getting started with functional testing in Grails is incredibly easy. Environment setup is taken care of when the plug-in starts up the Grails container before executing the tests and then shuts it down subsequently. This means any data defined in BootStrap.groovy is made available to the tests, so as with manual testing, common test data can be preloaded. We also get the benefit of not having to worry about separate configuration for different environments as Grails comes ready to run with its own Servlet container and database.

Functional tests implemented...