Grails Training

Congratulations to the Pittsburgh Steelers on winning Superbowl XLIII. I lost a bet on the game. The Cardinal's "Feather Curtain" just didn't hold up. Regardless, it was an exciting game and you know there had to be great preparation and training for these players, like in any professional sport. Programmers on the other hand, do not always get lucrative contracts, sponsors or their own line of sneakers...but they still have to train. I recently attended a 3-day training class, "Introduction to Groovy, Grails and AJAX", hosted by Smokejumper IT's Robert Fischer. The outline of the class was as follows:

Day 1:
Installing Groovy and Grails, GroovyConsole, Classes, Properties, Methods, Closures, MVC, Structure of Grails, Configuring Grails.
Day 2:
Controllers, Views, Taglibs, Parameters, the Flash, Session, Domain Objects, Domain Objects in Controllers, Command Objects, Services.
Day 3:
Rendering non-view responses, RemoteField, RemoteFunction, RemoteLink, FormRemote, Custom AJAX via Prototype, AJAX Plugins.

This was a much-needed introduction to Groovy and Grails, especially for me since I'm a beginner to the framework. I was able to get questions answered and have access to Robert's depth of knowledge on the subject. I learned about the Grails configuration, ranges, iterators, closures, lists, maps, Grails MVC and testing. Robert also demonstrated use of the many available Grails plugins to enhance your development needs.

Whenever I'm learning a new technology, I'm grateful just to find a good book on the subject. Having Grails training available where you can learn the right way quickly is very exciting. I'm already looking ahead for the next class. Smokejumper IT has other classes scheduled on Grails Object Relational Mapping (GORM), Domain-Specific Languages, Plugins, etc. They are also available in other cities throughout the country. Details can be found at http://www.smokejumperit.com.