Learning Ratpack

Foreword

If you want to know Ratpack, you have come to the right place. This book is the best and most comprehensive learning resource out there, and Dan is an integral part of the team and community behind Ratpack. I am thrilled that this book is now available.

There are many tools for writing web applications on the JVM, of which Ratpack is one. I set out to make Ratpack excel at scaling in all relevant ways. While performance and efficiency are crucial, the ability to start simple for greenfield tasks yet scale toward solving more challenging problems is equally important. You should feel as empowered by your tools after two years as you did after two days. This is Ratpack’s mission, which Dan eloquently conveys.

We are now building, testing, and deploying web infrastructure differently than we were just a few years ago. Developers and users are, rightfully, more demanding than ever. Applications must integrate with and exist within an ever-shifting landscape of tools, practices, and platforms. Ratpack takes this to heart in several ways: it is a pure runtime in that it does not impose a proprietary mechanism for build automation, nor does it require proprietary plugins for IDE integration; it treats deep testability as a first-class concern; and it favors integration over abstraction, allowing more direct use of complementary technologies such as persistence, marshalling, and templating. This is a conscious trade-off of out-of-the-box magic for long term flexibility and control. ...