Yesterday, Princeton Java Group hosted two presentations -Real World Groovy and Getting Started with Grails by Andrew Glover and Jason Rudolph. Both are excellent and very enthusiastic speakers. The slides from the Grails part are available over here .

Groovy is good scripting language, which deserves a lot more attention from Java community. There were several presentations on Groovy and Grails at JavaOne and the rooms were packed, but I do not understand why Sun did not pick Groovy as a scripting language for rich Internet applications? Why not create a GUI framework of Groovy components from scratch (no Swing allowed) and marry it with the upcoming Consumer JRE (Groovy already runs on JRE)?

Grails was inspired by Ruby on Rails, and it also uses this smart principle of convention over configuration ndash; the project structure is always the same. Development of a basic Web CRUD application is a matter of minutes and you do not need to write these tedious methods that any DAO object has to have. It “s easily integrated with Spring. Grails has its own way of defining relations between classes (has many, belongs to) but it also supports Hibernate ORM framework.

Thank you No Fluff Just Stuff for sending these excellent speakers to Princeton, and if you live in the area, attend this symposium in August.