Getting ready

Install the Eclipse Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS). download link is available at the Grails pages at http://grails.org/products/ggts.

How to do it...

Carry out the following steps in order to create a new Grails project with Vaadin:

How it works...

We have made a Grails project where we have replaced the Grails view layer with a Vaadin framework. The integration between Grails and Vaadin is done by the Grails plugin that is connecting these two frameworks. As you have experienced, the Vaadin plugin is available via the Grails plugin system (http://grails.org/plugin/vaadin).

Let's have a close look at what the Vaadin plugin has generated for us.

The MyUI.groovy file has been generated inside the grails-app/vaadin source folder. MyUI represents the Vaadin user interface, which is shown to the user in the browser window.

package app

import com.vaadin.ui.UI
import com.vaadin.ui.VerticalLayout
import com.vaadin.server.VaadinRequest
import com.vaadin.ui.Label
import com.vaadin.grails.Grails

class MyUI extends UI {

  @Override
  protected void init(VaadinRequest vaadinRequest) {
    VerticalLayout layout = new VerticalLayout()
    String homeLabel = Grails.i18n("default.home.label")
    Label label = new Label(homeLabel)
    layout.addComponent(label)
    setContent(layout)
  }
}

We should store all the Vaadin code we create inside the grails-app/vaadin source folder.

The Vaadin plugin needs to have information about the location of the MyUI class in order to add that information to the web.xml deployment descriptor. Therefore, a new file VaadinConfig.groovy has been generated inside the grail-app/conf folder.

vaadin {
  mapping = [ "/*": "app.MyUI" ]
  productionMode = false
}

environments {
  production {
    vaadin {
      productionMode = true
    }
  }
}

In VaadinConfig.groovy, we can change the path to the UI class. We can also add more UI classes.

vaadin {
  mapping = [ "/*": "app.MyUI", "/ui/*": "app.YourUI" ]

The last thing which has been done during the plugin installation is the removal of the URL mapping inside the UrlMappings.groovy file.

See also