theJavaJar.com

Are you looking to create a simple data driven web application for your team or department in less than 2 hours? Do you need the power of Java but the flexibility of a simple scripting language? You need to check out grails and get done with your project. Why fight with all the usual hassles of enterprise development when all you need is an application that, in all purposes, has been written time and time again? CRUD(create, read, update, delete) applications are all over each and every industry so why not remove the boilerplate code and just focus on the domain-model and let Grails take on most of the work for you? I am currently working on a small Grails web application that I am customizing to fit my needs, but right out of the box with a basic domain-model, the application worked with little know-how on my end.

Grails does not solve every problem in the world. Grails is still immature but the future looks very bright. Grails does not fix bad modeling or poor design. Grails can be used successfully where you see fit.

I have been recently developing a small Web application using Groovy and Grails and I am extremely pleased with what is there and what is on the horizon. The application I am working on is a simple contact management system with about 6 or so domain classes. Using Grails’ default code generation tool and Eclipse, I had the application up and running in about an hour. I spent most of my time learning some of the Groovy syntax and a getting an understanding of GORM, Grails Object Relational Mapping. There is a small learning curve and the learning curve is even smaller if you know Java and understand an ORM tool like Hibernate.

The paradigm of “Coding by Convention” with Groovy on Grails has been borrowed from Ruby on Rails and you can read everyone’s opinion about how each language and framework size up but I think it is all about your comfort level. Groovy is great if you already know Java and if you are running Java 6 you can run Ruby on the Java VM so why not learn Ruby?

It is great for quickly writing some Intranet applications or any Web application you see fit. I recommend writing a simple Web application with Groovy and Grails and once you see what is there, you will be writing some nice Web tools to help you or your IT department get things done.