grails excellent web framework

For long time I had kind of resistance to have a look at some "new" and exciting scripting languages like groovy or ruby. For some unknown reasons, few days ago I decided to take a very short look at a groovy. I read documentation, examples and I liked it. But that would not be enough to invest some time to learn it. But then I noticed link to grails, web framework so far unknown for me. As for past months I am deeply within web development I decided to read a little bit about it.

I have downloaded grails, opened tutorial and had hello world example in 60 secs. I couldn't believe it. With JSF combined with Facelets, RichFaces, MyFaces (what is advisable as technology stack) for hello world you need hours of configuration. Sometimes even when you use RAD tools like Red Hat Developer Studio.

This increased my courage and I continued reading some advance tutorials. Tutorial is nice and it seemed to easy to be true. So I gave it a try. I downloaded the book from infoQ and followed instructions from the book (the whole book). I didn't use tutorial because I wanted to try much wider approach than one covered in tutorial. Everything worked smoothly. For me this is excellent discovery. After using JSF and lot of surrounding technologies, I got framework with which it is really easy to create web applications. So far it seems that with grails web application development is as it should be: easy and fun.

I am sure I will continue to investigate grails and as I have some decision possibilities I hope that maybe we will do some commercial project with it.

My advice:
If you didn't try grails yet, try it right now, you will be pleasantly surprised.