Groovy presents it self as an agile, dynamic language for the Java platform. And indeed, Groovy is like a super version of Java. It can leverage Java's enterprise capabilities but also has cool productivity features like closures, builders and dynamic typing. If you are a developer, tester or script guru, you have to love Groovy.
Grails aims to bring the "coding by convention" paradigm to Groovy. It's an open-source web application framework that leverages the Groovy language and complements Java Web development.
In this talk I will show you how to make a prototype web application including tests with Grails in very short time. Next I will show you, how to integrate your existing persistent storage, that is MySQL, with Grails Object Relational Mapping API. You will see how easy it is to create relationships between tables, enforce data validation rules, and change a relational database in your Grails application.
Even though Groovy and Grails are newcomers the community is large and growing. This means that many exciting plugins for your applications already exsists. I show you a few of these like the Searchable plugin and GrailUI plugin.
Flemming G. Jensen is currently working as a independant software engineer. He is focusing on programming in the Java language (J2SE/J2EE) using Spring, Hibernate, Bea WebLogic and the Apache Tomcat platforms, as well as trying to tweak Oracle and MySQL databases to do their best. Since 1995 he has enjoyed hacking with Linux.