I’ve placed my ebook order for Grails in Action (I’m a Manning fan – lol). I’m really looking forward to this one. I wanted to point out that while reviewing this book, I had a chance to sit down and read chapter 1. I recommend anyone interested in learning more about Grails to check it out.
Good stuff!
Steve Gentile's Tech Blog 
This looks pretty cool might have to check it out!
I hate that asp.net mvc did not take the scaffolding and scripting approach to building the app, it is soo much slower to get up and running – and is not opinonated at all.
Cheers
Jake
Yes, I think the same say. I did notice that asp.net mvc 2.0 is going to include templates, so that is a step forward. But as you say, the ability use the scripting console commands really speeds up the development and provides the common commands you work with on a day by day basis. The ‘apt-get’ ability to pull in plugins to be installed is equally powerful. ie. the Grails UI plugin pulls in everything needed to use the Yui library – dialogs, tabviews, datasource, autocompletion. My best comparision would be like trying to get MVCContrib Castle Windsor support in your mvc application. Sure would be nice to be able to pull that down in similiar manner. I know there is a project out there to help pull different projects together (horn ?). There is a maturity with the java ecosystem I believe – I do not know all the internal debates in that community. I do believe the java open source community is at a point where there are core projects used, there is a tremendous amount of support available, and it’s not all getting controlled from a centralized company (ie. Microsoft), so I think there is more ability to provide the best tools in one package independent if they are from Microsoft or not. In the Microsoft world, instead of building innovated projects like we see from Grails, ie. implementing NHibernate, they are instead competing against their own community, w/ORM’s like Entity Framework. More time imo could be invested into better tooling in VS – ie. designer support for NHibernate, rather than reinventing the wheel (and in turn releasing less mature software that is constantly behind the curve). Net is a great language really, but I question the dev teams at Microsoft agenda’s. From the web dev aspect, asp.net mvc is the closest thing we have to a decent web framework (outside of Castle’s Monorail). Problem is every organization is so entrenched in years and years of webform development, that these mvc frameworks – although common outside of the Microsoft ecosystem – are seen as unfamiliar and intimidating (ie. common response isn’t ‘wow, mvc makes it easier to test’, instead it’s ‘but my ultra data grid with it’s huge viewstate won’t work in mvc so I can’t use it’).
I should add… it’s so important that developers be able to reach outside of their own language and ecosystem to see innovation in other platforms.
One of my biggest obstacles, to be quite honest – isn’t the languages themselves…but the setting up of the environment, understanding where things go in the folder structures, etc… One of the that Grails approaches head on is the simplicity of getting started. I’m out looking how to setup tomcat, how to get the latest spring and hibernate working together, how to setup a ‘ant build script’. All of that is supported in Grails, but the experience is improved, and the developer can focus on implementing and building the application.