Chapter 1. Grails in a hurry . . .
This chapter covers
- What is Grails?
- Core Grails philosophy
- Grails installation
- Key components of a Grails application
- Your first Grails application—developing and deploying it
“Help, I’ve lost my Mojo!” That statement is a concise summary of what developers feel when working with any of the plethora of Java web frameworks. Each change requires time spent editing configuration files, customizing web.xml files, writing injection definitions, tweaking build scripts, modifying page layouts, and restarting apps. Aaaahhhh! “Where has all the fun gone? Why is everything so tedious? I wanted to whip up a quick app to track our customer signups! There must be a better way . . .” We hear you.
Grails is a next-generation Java web development framework that draws on best-of-breed web development tooling, techniques, and technologies from existing Java frameworks, and combines them with the power and innovation of dynamic language development. The result is a framework that offers the stability of technologies you know and love, but shields you from the noisy configuration, design complexity, and boilerplate code that make existing Java web development tedious. Grails allows you to spend your time implementing features, not editing XML.