Learning Ratpack

Chapter 2. Getting Started

Getting started in playing around with Ratpack is really easy, as was demonstrated in the previous chapter. Up until now, you have been exposed to Ratpack’s ability to easily get a prototype off the ground with just a few lines of Groovy. As you come to better understand working with Ratpack, it is important to note that while we can do everything we need to in a Groovy script, a collaborative and tested project will require proper application structure.

When building a new project, Ratpack’s nature as a lightly opinionated framework means that some guidance is provided. As we will discuss in this chapter, Gradle is the preferred build and dependency management system for Ratpack applications, and with it you will garner many simplicities and benefits that otherwise would not be available. In the spirit of not strictly imposing its opinions, the framework and its component feature sets are provided simply as a set of Java libraries, so no matter your favored build tool you will certainly find the means to integrate Ratpack.

As we dig into how the framework facilitates extensibility, you will find that your existing experience building and working in Java-based projects is immediately applicable, and not to be replaced with a new framework-specific understanding. Indeed, while Ratpack provides a foundation for building web applications, it—and its optional feature set—is made available to you as a set of libraries to be incorporated simply as project ...