Grails Goodness

I’m a huge fan of Grails, and after hearing a couple of talks on it at CodeMash last week I decided to check in on it’s progress. I had first caught wind of Grails last winter when I purchased the book The Definitive Guide to Grails. I had been attempting to learn Ruby on Rails, and was quite unimpressed. I’m a big fan of the whole “Convention over configuration” way of thinking, but for some reason Rails just never did it for me. Unfortunately the Grails project was undergoing so many API changes as it was working towards the 1.0 release, that it basically rendered the sample application in the book unusable. Through much digging through the documentation and the APIs I was able to struggle through most of the book and knew that this framework had great potential. So now Grails is approaching 1.0 very soon and it’s time to re-familiarize myself with this wonderful platform.

Earlier this week I discovered a new article on IBM’s DeveloperWorks site titled Mastering Grails: Build your first Grails Application by Scott Davis. This article is very much a basic introduction to Grails. It takes the reader through creating the application and generating a simple domain class and controller. I love how in less than 100 lines of code, we’re able to have a complete CRUD application. If you use scaffolding, you can do it in just 15. Just a taste, definitely leaving the reader wanting more. Hopefully the next article will go in depth much more. Thankfully the code actually works as is and I didn’t have to do any digging to find out how to make it work. Until Chris Judd and company finish their Grails book Practical Grails Projects, I guess I’m stuck wading through the tutorials that may or may not work anymore depending on how long ago they were written.