Grails, JQuery, and AJAX

MafiaDada

By now, you’re probably under the impression that I love Grails, and you wouldn’t be far off from the truth. Ever since I started using it almost a year ago, I’ve continually been amazed by just how darn productive I can be. One of the aspects I want to touch on today is how Grails helps you build rich internet applications (RIA).

Grails out of the box uses Prototype for its JavaScript framework, which means that developers have a number of GSP taglibs available which will automatically generate Prototype code to make AJAX-y calls.

Unfortunately, I “grew up” using JQuery, and thus feel more comfortable using JQuery as my JS framework. Luckily, Grails “has a plugin for that.” This means that if you’ve been using the Grails taglibs to generate your remote calls, you can install the plugin and it will generate JQuery code instead. Great for when you switch out your JS frameworks midstream…am I right?

Anyway, back on topic. First, let’s install the JQuery plugin. The official documentation is here, but, as you’ll soon see, they are a little incomplete. There are a number of ways to get your plugin installed.

1. From the command prompt, you can type in grails install-plugin jquery
2. From STS, you can press ctrl+shift+alt+g to open up the integrated Grails command line and type install-plugin jquery
3. From STS, you can select your project and press alt+g+m and install the jquery plugin from the UI manager

There is some bug preventing the plugin installation process from copying over the requisite jquery-1.4.4.js and jquery-1.4.4.min.js files over to your /web-app/js directory so you’ll then need to run the following:

grails InstallJQuery

You should see something like:
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