Chapter 8. Developing tasty forms, views, and layouts
This chapter covers
- Rendering and processing forms
- Writing custom tag libraries
- Creating stunning layouts
- Adding visual effects and animation
- Exploring interactive Ajax tags and remoting
You’ve spent most of the book building the heart of Hubbub: processing incoming requests; interacting with the data model; calling business logic; and creating posts, users, and timelines. It’s been fun, but not visually satisfying. It’s time to leave the core functionality behind and work on the UI of your web application.
A great-looking UI has all sorts of subtle impacts on the user. People think that a visually pleasing application is more robust, performs better, and is more productive than a bare-bones application, even though none of that may be true.
In this chapter, you’ll focus on the front end. You’ll cover the basics of putting forms together, and you’ll investigate how to support multiple browsers with reusable layouts. You’ll explore Grails’s handy new resources infrastructure which manages all your visual assets. You’ll also turn your attention to visual effects and implement slick animations and Ajax interactions. By the time you’re done, Hubbub will sparkle.
You first need to get a good grasp of Grails’s primary view technology, GSP, so your UI adventure begins with a tour of the core GSP form tags.