This article shows you how to create your own Grails plug-in. Once you see how effortless it is to create a plug-in, you'll understand why more than 250 Grails plug-ins are available now, with new ones being added all the time.

James Goodwill completes his two-part introduction to integrating memcached and Grails with a sample Grails application and a Java™-based memcached client. Learn how to integrate Spymemcached into your Grails-built, contact-management application, then try caching individual request results with memcached. You'll also use the memcached client commands introduced in Part 1 to test the effectiveness of your new cache.

In this Mastering Grails installment, Scott Davis introduces you to the world of Grails plug-ins. Adding whole areas of new functionality to your applications couldn't be easier. You'll learn how plug-ins do their magic, and you'll use a plug-in to implement powerful search capabilities in the Blogito application.

Grails makes it easy to ensure that your Web applications start out bug free and stay that way. As a bonus, you can leverage your test code to produce a rich set of executable documentation that is always up-to-date. This month, Grails guru Scott Davis shows you the Grails testing ropes.

In this installment of Mastering Grails, series author Scott Davis puts to rest any qualms about Grails' readiness for the enterprise. You'll see how to use Grails with enterprise-caliber libraries including the Java™ Management Extensions (JMX), Spring, and log4j.

The Spring Framework provides a solid foundation for Web and enterprise applications. Spring's support for dynamic languages like Groovy adds capabilities that can make your application architecture more flexible and dynamic. In the second and final installment of the Groovier Spring series, you'll learn how to change the behavior of Spring applications at run time using dynamically refreshable beans.

A burst of innovation in the open source world over the last few years has led to an increase in Java™ developer productivity. Freely available tools, frameworks, and solutions address once-common time sinks. A promising new entry on the scene is Apache CouchDB, hailed by some as the database for Web 2.0. The big picture of CouchDB is easy to grasp, and using it is as simple as using a Web browser. This Java development 2.0 column introduces CouchDB and shows you how Groovy's RESTClient can help you tap into its strengths.

Internal domain-specific languages (DSLs) are possible but cumbersome in the Java™ language because of its restrictive syntax. Other languages on the JVM are better suited to building them. This Evolutionary architecture and emergent design installment covers some of the capabilities you can exploit and issues you'll encounter when using Groovy to build internal DSLs

As with messages, files are displayed on the home page in the order they are added to the system. Currently all messages and files are displayed on the home page. Over time, our home page is going to become rather large and unwieldy. We need a user's home page to show only the files and messages that they are interested in. To do this, users need to be able to tag their content. The new Grails concepts that will be introduced in this two-part article series by Jon Dickinson are:
* Working with inheritance in the domain classes, and looking at which strategies GORM supports for persistence
* Using polymorphic queries over a domain inheritance hierarchy
* Encapsulating view-rendering logic in GSP templates
* Manipulating collections with the Groovy collect and sort methods

This article shows how your Grails applications can be a source of raw data — specifically, XML — that other Web applications can use. I'd normally describe this as setting up Web services for your Grails application, but the term is loaded with hidden meanings these days. Many people associate Web services with SOAP and a full-blown service-oriented architecture (SOA). Two plug-ins for Grails allow you to expose a SOAP interface to your application if you choose that route. But rather than deal with a specific implementation such as SOAP, I'll show you how to return Plain Old XML (POX) using an interface based on Representational State Transfer (REST).