Resource Plugin is a Grails plugin for managing static resources.

1. Grails Resources
Plugin
Alidad Soleimani (Grails developer)
Net Jets Inc.
alidadasb
https://github.com/alidadasb

2. Static Resource
• CSS
• JS
• Images
/web-app/
<link rel="..." href=...>
<g:external dir="css" file="main.css" />

3. Static Resource

4. Challenges
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Complex Applications
Plugins resources
Dependency between resources
Multiple copies of a resource
Different version of a resource
Order of resources

5. Managing Dependencies
• Mark Palmer’s blog

6. Optimization & Performance
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Cache resources
Minifying resources
Zipping
Bundling Resources

7. Performance Golden Rule
• “80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the
frontend. Start there”, Steve Souders
• How can we improve web performance going forward?

8. 14 Rules for Faster-Loading Web Sites
Steve Souders
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Rule 1 - Make Fewer HTTP Requests
Rule 2 - Use a Content Delivery Network
Rule 3 - Add an Expires Header
Rule 4 - Gzip Components
Rule 5 - Put Stylesheets at the Top
Rule 6 - Put Scripts at the Bottom
Rule 7 - Avoid CSS Expressions
Rule 8 - Make JavaScript and CSS External
Rule 9 - Reduce DNS Lookups
Rule 10 - Minify JavaScript
Rule 11 - Avoid Redirects
Rule 12 - Remove Duplicate Scripts
Rule 13 - Configure ETags
Rule 14 - Make AJAX Cacheable
“will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page”

9. Grails’ static resource management
• 2008 - UI Performance Plugin
• 2009 - Resources Plugin
• Asset-pipeline

10. Introduction to resources plugin
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http://grails.org/plugin/resources
Authors: Mark Palmer, Luke Daley
2009 initial version
2011 Plugin in 1.3.x
2012 shipped with Grails 2.0
Current stable version 1.2.RC2
Organization : Grails Community

11. Resources Plugin
A plugin that provides a powerful streamlined asset
pipeline
“This plugin represents a new way of declaring and
linking to static resources in your application and plugins.
Resource dependencies can be declared and pages
simply indicate which resource modules they require.
The plugin does the rest, and provides a processing
pipeline for advanced optimizations.”(Colin Harrington)

12. Defining Modules
• Define inside config.groovy
• Define inside *Resources.groovy

13. Declaring modules
MyResources.groovy

14. Referring to Resources
Page1.gsp

15. Defining Modules
• Resources from a given module are loaded in the order they
are defined in the module
• Resources from modules are loaded in module dependency
order

16. Tag Libs
• r:external : This tag renders the right kind of links to external
resources, based on their type
• r:img
• r:layoutResources
• r:require
• r:resource: This tag returns the URL to use link to a resource.
g:resource will delegate to r:resource automatically

17. Defining Layout
Main.gsp
The r:require tag tells the framework which resource modules the
current GSP requires.
The <r:layoutResources/> is a placeholder for where to include the
resources

18. Referring to Resources
Page1.gsp

19. Ad-hoc resources
• As of Grails 2.0 <img> is aware of resources

20. 5 primary functions
• Bundling of resources into modules with dependency
management.
• Processing of resources prior to serving them.
• Tag library to render links to resources in modules.
• Tag library to render links to other resources which are not in
modules.
• Service of resources to clients based on appropriate requests.

21. Processing of resources
• Extensible pipeline of mappers
Peter Ledbrook

22. Phases:

23. Images:

24. Debugging
println grailsResourceProcessor.dumpResources()

25. Other Plugins
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Cached Resources
Zipped Resources
Less CSS Resources
Modernizr for Grails

26. Configuration

27. YSLOW

28. YSLOW

29. Asset-PipeLines
• On the fly processing - No more waiting for your assets to
reload after making a change
• Compiled assets by generator - No more hanging up
application boot times while processing files. `grails assetprecompile`
• Reduced Dependence - The plugin has compression,
minification, and cache-digests built in.
• Easy Debugging - Makes for easy debugging by keeping files
seperate in development mode.
• Simpler manifests and taglibs - Read on for more information.

30. Bundling of Resources into Modules
with Dependency Management
• define resource modules that have a name and contain one or
more resources
• declared in separate files named like ModuleResources.groovy
• separate modules block within Config.groovy
• The resources can either be local to the application, and
declared with the usual map of attributes, such as dir: and
file:, or external to the application, with an absolute url
containing ://

31. Bundling of Resources into Modules
with Dependency Management
• require tag for the module