Grails in Action

Chapter 6. Developing tasty views, forms, and layouts

In this chapter

• How GSPs work
• The common GSP tag libraries
• Rendering and processing forms
• Writing custom tag libraries
• Creating stunning layouts
• Adding visual effects and animation
• Explore interactive Ajax tags and remoting

We’ve spent most of the book so far 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 a lot of fun, but not visually satisfying. It’s time to leave the core functionality behind and do some work on the user interface (UI) of our web application.

A great-looking UI has all sorts of subtle impacts on the user. People think that a visually pleasing application ...