Book excerpt: Summary Griffon in Action is a comprehensive tutorial written for Java developers who want a more productive approach to UI development. After a quick Groovy tutorial, you'll immediately dive into Griffon and start building examples that explore its high productivity approach to Swing development. About the Technology You can think of Griffon as Grails for the desktop. It is a Groovy-driven UI framework for the JVM that wraps and radically simplifies Swing. Its declarative style and approachable abstractions are instantly familiar to developers using Grails or JavaFX. About the Book Griffon in Action gets you going quickly. Griffon's convention-over-configuration approach requires minimal code to get an app off the ground, so you can start seeing results immediately. You'll learn how SwingBuilder and other Griffon "builders" provide a coherent DSL-driven development experience. Along the way, you'll explore best practices for structure, architecture, and lifecycle of a Java desktop application. Written for Java developers—no experience with Groovy, Grails, or Swing is required. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. What's Inside Griffon from the ground up Full compatibility with Griffon 1.0 Using SwingBuilder and the other "builders" Practical, real-world examples Just enough Groovy ======================================= Table of Contents PART 1 GETTING STARTED Welcome to the Griffon revolution A closer look at Griffon PART 2 ESSENTIAL GRIFFON Models and binding Creating a view Understanding controllers and services Understanding MVC groups Multithreaded applications Listening to notifications Testing your application Ship it! Working with plugins Enhanced looks Griffon in front, Grails in the back Productivity tools