Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional

Foreword

The year 2005 was a traumatic year for the Java web application development community. It was under fire for the unnecessary "fat" architecture of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) systems compared to the new kids on the block like Ruby on Rails and Django. The search began for Java's answer to these frameworks. I had an existing product that was heavily invested in Java frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate, but because I had been involved with the Groovy team for a while, I knew we could create the solution that people were looking for. Hence, Grails was born.

I knew Groovy itself was a phenomenal piece of technology that combined the best of the dynamic language worlds and Java. Innovation has been rife within the Groovy ...