The advantage of Grails

This week Spring Source have released, Spring Web Flow 2, I've read release notes and this make me think about the advantage of Grails.

Let's see release notes:

• "The Web Flow module is a MVC extension that allows you to define Controllers using a domain-specific-language."

DSL to define flows the fact is XML+EL. I think is much readable Grails DSL to define WebFlows and less verbose.

• Spring Javascript is a JavaScript abstraction framework that allows you to progressively enhance a web page with behavior.

Spring Javascript is built over Dojo to provide Ajax abstractions and rich widget behavior, and Grails do it, with tags, and Ajax agnostic calls (Prototype, Dojo, YUI, etc).

• The Spring Faces module contains Spring's support for JavaServerFaces.

Who cares JSF? The EJBs in the view layer, jeje.

• Using Spring Security to secure your flows in a declarative manner

A lot of security plugins for Grails.

• Using Tiles for JSP page composition and Ajax partial-rendering

Grails layouts, templates and content negotiation are fantastic to do this.

And the best, Grails can be updated to use Spring Webflow 2.

But, the advantage goes further, with Servlet 3.0 and generation of web.xml, I can do it with Grails plugins, and really futher with Java 7 and closures.

Great feedback in Grails Course

In last week I've been teaching in Groovy and Grails course, around 15 students, some people from Struts 1.x, some people from PHP, some portal developers with Vignette, and newbie people from University.

The people were very interested in Grails, and all said that is very easy learn, and create Web apps.

Great experience.