Thanks to Ken for his excellent introduction to Grails.

Abstract

Grails is a dynamic-language based, complete-stack framework that brings simplicity and elegance to web development. It uses the Groovy programming language to work with the existing, mature open-source projects Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh. Through its plug-in system, it incorporates many other projects as well, ranging from Quartz scheduling to GWT user interfaces to Spring (Acegi) Security, with more added all the time.

Grails provides seamless integration with existing Java classes, works with all Java Enterprise Edition APIs, and deploys its applications as standard WAR files. While it provides a simple DSL for mapping domain models to database data (and comes with both a database and its own web server), its only persistence limitations are those of Hibernate. It makes use of convention over configuration in order to simplify development and reduces the necessity for massive XML files, but it does not prevent a developer from taking advantage of what they already have.

This talk will demonstrate some of the main features of web site development with Grails, including

• Object-relational mapping with GORM
• Scaffolding, both static and dynamic
• Testing
• Using RESTful web services
• User interface design with Groovy Server Page

Speaker

Ken Kousen is President of Kousen IT, Inc. (http://www.kousenit.com ), through which he does consulting, development, and technical training in all areas of Java and XML. He has been a technical editor for several books related to Java and Groovy, including _Groovy Recipes_ and _Programming Groovy_. Along with Scott Davis, he is the co-author of the upcoming book from O'Reilly entitled _Making Java Groovy_, which is all about integrating Java and Groovy together to make development easier.