What would you like to see in a Grails / Flex book?

11 Replies

If you could pick up a book that taught you Grails and Flex, what topics would be important to you?

My last blog post generated a lot of interest, and I was contacted by a publisher that would be interested in seeing a proposal. I got the blessings from the chief to start putting a proposal together.

Here is some of the topic ideas I have for it, based on my experiences with Grails and Flex. What do you think is missing? What would you like to read in a book that dealt with Grails and Flex?

I guess my idea for a book would be one that will tackle common problems in Flex development ( faced mostly by those in a digital marketing / advertising / rich internet application ) perspective, and finding simple, elegant solutions in Grails.

My list of common questions are:

  • What are my options in integrating Flex / Grails ? ( BlazeDS / Flex Plugin / REST services )
  • How do I make my build process more efficient / integrated? ( Maven / write own plugins )
  • How do I add Search? ( Lucene / Searchable plugin )
  • How do I make my website Search Engine Optimized, accessible? ( Deep Linking / Content Negotiation )
  • How do I integrate with third parties and present alternative content? ( Facebook, iPhone views, Mail, Paypal )
  • How do I manage my content / assets ? ( Scaffolding, transients )
  • How do I support multiple Languages? ( i18n template, i18n-domains )
  • How do I scale my content? ( Mor.ph, Amazon EC2, Terracota, Solr )
  • How do I support AIR / Flash? ( Localconnection, REST services / XML )
  • How do I transform my legacy database / data into one that is Flex ready? ( GRAG )

What do you think?

11 thoughts on “What would you like to see in a Grails / Flex book?”

  1. geoff-5289

    I would like to see the following:

    a) blazeDS messaging hooked up to JMS adapter. Analyze diffs of polling vs. non-polling options (streaming)

    b) Using XMPP via XIFF or some other alternative to implement real-time messaging. (including leveraging public jabber servers vs. just setting up your own private ones)

    c) security

    d) AIR: auto-updater, badge, docking in tray

    Reply ↓
  2. JS

    This (future) book is a wonderful idea and tackles what’s in the air (no pun intended) nowadays.

    For my part I would like to read about building and integrating Grails and Flex in an enterprise manner:
    – build process obviously
    – deployment options
    – tooling available, tutorials (lots)
    – actionscript/flex intro

    This last point is very important IMO because the targeted audience for this book is Grails and, to some extent, Java developers with no (or little) knowledge of building a GUI with an RIA framework.

    Keep us posted of your progress.

    Reply ↓
  3. Sakuraba

    – Development workflow between designers, coders, product/project-mgt, etc.
    – Flex Tooling (possibly free alternatives to FlexBuilder?)

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  5. Roger

    I would love to see a Step by step development of a “real” enterprise app using grails and flex, that includes:

    – Security
    – Complex GUI’s
    – Data binding options
    – I18n
    – Build process (Maven)
    -Tools, IDE’s and tutorials.

    Reply ↓
  6. Robert Dempsey

    Along with your list and the additions from commenters, I would like to see the creation of a somewhat non-trivial application. The Flexible Rails book is great, however the example used is not comprehensive in terms of using Flex functionality such as view states and components for a multi-part application. An application with a single view (after log in) is somewhat simplistic and a great beginner example, however I’d like to see that go a step further and see something with multiple “pages” that include things like user management, etc.

    Good luck with the book if you go down that route. We love Flex and are using it to front-end Rails applications. We are looking at doing the same with Grails, and any advice is greatly appreciated.

    Reply ↓
  7. Guy Naor

    There are a few things I’d love to see n a book like that:

    1. Introductory level application

    2. Advanced level topics shown in the context of a real aplication

    3. Automated testing for both front and backend

    4. Deployment best practices and examples

    Hope to see this book out soon!

    Reply ↓

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  10. John A

    + 1 on the suggestions from “Roger”.

    The security part should be RESTful with a Flex client for user and session management, utilizing the Mate framework in Flex, binding Grails REST services to Mate model manager objects.

    The complex GUI part should include Reporting/Charting.

    Netbeans FLEX support would also be interesting.

    Reply ↓
  11. Qingshan Bie

    Hi There,
    I am kind of late for this topic (the book will be published in Dec.) I hope followings are included

    1) the maven build. The maven vs ant (or Gant, whatever) is like Grails vs Struts. Besides, maven is just a Object-Oriented build but a project management tool as well. However, the Grails team is still using Gant and rejecting maven. I bet most web developers would like using maven to build flex + grails. Hope you have detailed stuff on this subject.

    2) A non-trivial yet introductory demo application project is build thorough the chapters, making the book like a senior geek walk through a complete project with a beginner.

    3) If due to the limit of pages some topics cannot be explain very deep then the links to outside the book are shown.

    I have pre-ordered a copy from amazon. Hope to have it at hand soon.

    Best,
    Qingshan

    Reply ↓

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