Lately I’ve tried out the Grails framework a bit for a little pet project. It started with a little peek on Groovy, and then after a little messing around with the “getting started” part, I wanted to check out grails as well. I must say it was very pleasant to work with!

Though it was a very little project I did with Grails, I think ihas potential. I really like the way everything is done by convention, and the plugins just makes it incredible simple to have a lot of functionality up and running in no time! Security, searching and JMS just to mention a few. Check out the plugin portal if you are curious. One more thing I find cool is that you can run Grails applications on Google App Engine. This is done very easily by using a plugin!

I also noticed a project named Griffon which is a Grails like framework for developing desktop applications in Groovy. I haven’t tried it out, but it seems interesting. As I read about Griffon I also got aware of the UI toolkits SWT and Pivot. Frankly I did only know of AWT and Swing, but the next time I decide to write a GUI app in Java or Groovy, I’ll definitely consider trying out one of these

Finally, some groovy and grails resources.

http://grailstutorials.com – The design is crap, but there are a lot of tutorials)
http://grailspodcast.com/blog/list – Interesting podcasts with the latest grails/groovy news
http://goo.gl/uTEM – An article on groovy meta programming (there’s a lot of groovy stuff on the same site)