Testimonials

Last updated by mehul07 1 day ago
In addition to the case studies on this page, SpringSource also has several available on its website. Just follow the link and search the page for "Groovy" or "Grails".

SpringSource Case Studies

Genxbio(www.genxbio.info) Accelerates Development and Deployment With Groovy and Grails. Thanks for Grails & Groovy

Team for such a wonderful framework

Genxbio Health Sciences Pvt. Ltd is one of the fastest growing biotech group in India that has successfully entered the clinical path /nanotechnology and pharmaceutical product development space. Genxbio was established to provide the most comprehensive product range in the fields of biotechnology, molecular biology, genomics, proteomics and pharmaceuticals sciences for the international and national Life Science R&D communities. Genxbio has been providing unparalleled service and support to our customers by combining technical expertise, quality material and sound business strategies. We have been growing dynamically towards our aim of becoming a leading supplier in the Asian continent. As we move forward we would like to reemphasize our commitment to quality, innovation and customer satisfaction and our utmost belief in helping our customers achieve their aims.

Sky.com Accelerates Release Cycle Six Fold With Groovy and Grails

Sky is the UK's leading entertainment and communications company, operating a multi-channel television service with 9.4+ million customers - a third of households in the UK and Ireland. Sky also operates multiple websites to deliver entertainment, news and other content to customers, and the company is the UK's fastest growing broadband and fixed-telephony provider.

Sky's network of sites extend the company's reach, attracting millions of unique users each month who contribute to over 1 billion monthly page impressions. The home page of sky.com links to content across a variety of sites and plays a vital role in helping Sky achieve its goal to increase traffic across all sites and gain new customers for its portfolio of services.

"Now using Groovy and Grails, we release every week to production, compared with every six weeks previously."

Jon Mullen, sky.com ScrumMaster

Wired.com Simplifies and Accelerates Development with Grails

Wired.com, the online arm of Wired Magazine, is a cutting edge guide covering how technology is changing the world. Not simply an online version of the print publication, however, Wired.com delivers a unique online experience to 12 million readers around the world.

"Our developers are much happier developing in Grails because they can accomplish tasks so much faster"

Paul Fisher, Tech Mgr Wired.com

BringIt Quick Prototyping and turn around for Beta Release

http://ibring.it

BringIt is the workout log dedicated to the P90X program.

It is a relatively new web app but with big plans for the future.

Check out Joe BringIt's stats

Aegeon Accelerates Product Development with Groovy and Grails

Aegeon is a Web 2.0 company focused on Enterprise Social Software solutions. Its principle activities are product development and professional services surrounding Spaceo.us, an innovative Enterprise Social Software platform.

"In a traditional Java project, we can spend weeks writing the initial code to set up the infrastructure, which is just the plumbing code. In Groovy and Grails, we can do that in a couple of hours with plug-ins."

Rob James, CTO of Aegeon

User Testimonials

What Grails users say about their experiences. Also take a look at the Success Stories page for a list of sites currently running Grails.

Add your own story by clicking the "Edit" link above!

Treasury Investment System (TIS)

  • Overview: A web based tool, that manages the various investments made by the treasury department of Piramal Healthcare limited. Developed at Neebal Technologies.

"We at Neebal, use to develop web applications using Struts,Springs and hibernate at different layers of the application. Using them separately, caused an excess of configuration files, and plumbing code, used to integrate these technologies. And then comes GRAILS, a breath of fresh air. The TIS product, with an array of functionalities, was developed within months. We are also in love with the vibrant plugin eco-system.

Thank You Grails. You are the ultimate superstar :-)"

Mehul Chopra, Software Developer at Neebal Technologies

Self Evident Enterprises Creates SalesGoals.com with Distributed Grails/Groovy Team

Self Evident Enterprises used a distributed workforce spanning four countries to rapidly produce http://www.salesgoals.com, a full-featured online sales CRM solution with RESTful API services integrated to a native iOS iPhone application.

SalesGoals.com

Vodafone Music Store

After having evaluated several Java frameworks, we decided that Grails was perfect to fulfil our requirements and be able to develop and launch the new Vodafone Music Store in a very short time, meeting the strict deadline for product launch.

Grails provides the developers with all the tools needed to achieve the tasks in an efficient and effective manner without having to deal with configurations or low level details.

The store makes an extensive use of Ajax and the Grail built-in support for Ajax has definitively helped us a lot. Not to mention the rich set of plugins that can significantly reduce the development times.

I cannot count how many times we have exclaimed “WOW!” realizing how Grails makes things easy. Grails turned out to be definitely the right choice.

Vincenzo Foderà (v.fodera@reply.it) - http://www.reply.de/en/ - May 05, 2011

CampusBookHound - save more and spend less on textbooks!

http://www.CampusBookHound.com/

CampusBookHound gives you the freedom to sell books for the price you want and buy them for the best deal possible. Sellers set the price, so you know you will get the most for your books, better than the bookstore's buy-back prices. Buyers bid on books at prices below the bookstore. Both the seller and the buyer get the best of both worlds.

"Grails has helped us develop this product in a few short months. We have been extremely happy with the development functionality and ease that comes with Grails and Groovy!"

Venkatt Guhesan, Founder of CampusBookHound

SAP SDN Blogreader for iPad, iPhone and Android devices

The SAP SDN Blogreader is a case study for writing an app that runs at iPad, iPhone and Android devices leveraging Grails at the backend and the HTML5 framework Sencha Touch at the frontend. Furthermore the Grails appengine plugin is used to deploy this application at the Google appengine.

The purpose of this app is to view the weblogs that are published in SDN at the above mentioned devices. Grails was hereby as always a perfect framework to implement the backend part.

You find more information about the app in this SAP SDN blog http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/22392

Helmut Tammen - http://www.tammen-it-solutions.de - Dec. 09, 2010

service-repository.com

service-repository.com is a directory listing public available Web Services that can be used for free. It helps developers to find useful services and it provides information extracted from the service's WSDL description. The registry reports WSDL changes and shows the differences between them.

CROWDPARK

CROWDPARK offers german Prediction Markets for topics like Sports, Music and Lifestyle. In December 2010 they launched an international platform for the US adience.

Tradoria Online Shop

Tradoria has been known to insiders of the online shopping world for quite a while now. But now their growth has reached new dimensions as they start to include bestesellers into their regimen.

Mailshare

Simple, powerful and easy to use email system which saves storage space by efficiently sharing and tagging mails instead of forwarding multiple copies. It has options like Remote logout, Auditing, Scheduled mails, Labels, Chat, Document storage and sharing, Sticky and much more. Previously known as mybetamail.com and the link http://mybetamail.com is still active.

Predeep Ravi - http://mymailshare.com

CrossFit in Germany

CrossFit in Deutschland is getting bigger and bigger. The fast growing community need information on training locations, CrossFit training programs, CrossFit Gyms in Germany and more. All this information and much more on CrossFit, diet, training and fitness can be found on http://www.nicodoescrossfit.com/p/crossfit-in-deutschland.html

CrossFit in Deutschland - http://www.nicodoescrossfit.com/

CentraStage

I took a chance (informed chance I should add) deciding to use Grails for the server management web application for the server component of our platform. I have never looked back, right from v0.5 until now. It has made us so much more productive and it truly is a pleasure to develop in Grails because I am able to focus on what needs to be solved, rather than how it needs to be solved. The plethora of Grails plugins also enhances the Grails offering appreciably.

We have found the Grails mailing list to be very active and responsive, and usually a problem we encounter has already been solved by a quick search in the Nabble archives.

We recently launched a public website, centrastage.net, where people can sign up to a free CentraStage account, to help them manage their PCs. Go take a look at http://www.centrastage.com and click on the Free Trial Account button if you want to see for yourselves what we are doing with Grails. It's easy peasy.

Darryl Pentz - http://www.centrastage.com

Businessworld

"We at IntelliGrape have been working on Groovy and Grails for quite some time. One of our clients, Businessworld, the largest selling business magazine in India, wanted to rebuild its existing portal.

Time frame given to us to develop the entire portal was very aggressive. Since we knew the power of Grails, it seemed the only solution to develop such a complex application in a time span of 6 months.

Website content is managed and stored in Alfresco WCM and consumed by Grails application through RESTful web services.

Grails provides a no ceremony, Convention over Configuration framework that increases the developer's productivity manifolds. Being Agile comes naturally with Grails.

Thanks to its DRY principle, accommodating requirements changes was a breeze. Vibrant Grails community & extensive online documentation ensured that we never got stuck with any issue for more than a few hours. Its intuitiveness helped speed up the productivity of team members new to Grails framework. http://www.studligasumo.kiev.ua/tayskiy-box/

The site receives high number of hits & is deployed on a modest configuration server, but still we are able to provide very fast response time. I imagined building the same application with a tradition J2EE stack; it would have surely taken 2-3x more time. Its fun developing with Grails.

Aman Aggarwal - IntelliGrape

Milk Nursing Wear

I have longed consulted with developers and webmaster regarding the platform I should use for my ecommerce site and finally chose Grails. I did that because I heard the framework helps develop quickly and in a simple way. I wanted to launch fast and Grails seem to fit for such a goal.

Yoav http://www.milknursingwear.com

Producteev

We at producteev are developing a Task Management platform on Grails, and enjoying every moment of it. We are in the web 2.0 world and we have a need to launch new version quickly and often. we find grails very useful for this kind of work and happy we discovered it soon in the life of the company. It helps us preform our business goal better and be on top of everything.

The light weight of grails is so attractive to us that we are planing on using it for a many more years here.

Yoav Fertstien - http://www.producteev.com

ebookstamper.com

I have been using Grails now for 2-3 years. I built a few projects that were beta tested but mostly never seen the light of day. This is my first commercial project to go live built on Grails. My background is Java web development for the last 11+ years from servlet/ejb to spring/spring-mvc/hibernate. Grails and Groovy is simply the next evolutionary step. Although, it is that good you could say it is "revolutionary". There are so many awesome things about Grails I could not cover here. Basically if you are a startup and you are not using Grails then you are crazy. The Speed and Productivity that it gives you is incredible. You spend all your time solving your problems and not wasting plumbing your architecture. See my blog for some coolness i have experienced using Grails. http://blog.peterdelahunty.com

Peter Delahunty - http://blog.peterdelahunty.com

Comparision Company

Developing a comparison engine that could be used for different purposes such as dating and others I had to build it with something fast and scalble. My friends advised me to go with Grails. I looked deeper into the solution and found it very interesting. Quickly I started hacking a little bit with Grails and was amazed. Since then I am hooked

Bella http://www.top10bestdatingsites.com/

TwitCaps.com

  • URL: http://TwitCaps.com
  • Overview: TwitCaps allows users to browse, sort and collect the latest images being posted to Twitter
After playing with Grails for the better part of two years on just about every last one of my pet projects, I decided this was the perfect application to build and take to production with Grails. A heavily data driven application with hooks to multiple RESTful APIs (Twitter, Twitpic, yFrog, etc), the GORM capabilities of Grails allowed me to complete my domain and data models - essentially, designing as I went - and prototype the base functionality of the application in a single weekend. The Quartz plugin allowed me to quickly stand-up my data slurpers / pruners within , literally, a matter of hours after conceiving them.

I ran into unexpected difficulties with some of the more complex queries used for filtering, but thanks to the flexibility of Grails, where GORM doesn't work, I can drop to Hibernate Criteria. Where Criteria do not suffice, I can drop to HQL. And where HQL fails, I'll drop straight to Groovy SQL. When it starts to seem like I've coded myself into a corner, there's always a (not necessarily inelegant) fall-back.

The AJAX UI aspects have been the most difficult and time-consuming, but that is mostly due to lack of familiarity on my part. Once the pattern was established, I'm finding it easier to code-up new pieces of AJAX functionality.

At my day job as a Senior Java Engineer for a Telecommunications company, we're stuck in the corporate IT world of the early 2000s. Thanks to Grails and Groovy, I feel reinvigorated as a developer to be learning something new again. In my 15 years slinging code, I can honestly say I've never had so much fun.

Jonathan - http://twitcaps.com

AmboCarta.com tarot software

  • URL: http://www.AmboCarta.com
  • Overview: AmboCarta.com is an online tarot software and lenormand software offering virtual card tables for live online card readings, personal cartomancy and for archiving card spreads. It runs completly in a browser with a mix of html and Adobe Flex.
AmboCarta lets you perform card readings for other people over the internet. Also you can archive your card spreads, and link to your spreads from any forum, blog, email or twitter! Now it's possible for your qerents to shuffle cards, draw cards, cut cards, and be part of their reading by watching the cards move while you lay out your card spreads. AmboCarta.com tarot software is a great tool for teaching or learning to read the cards. AmboCarta.com offers everything you need to follow your way of handling your cards. There's a free trial period for cartomancers, no strings attached. AmboCarta.com tarot software is available in english and german. AmboCarta is also available as a Facebook app, twitter bot and it tweets itself on a daily basis. AmboCarta makes use of the powerful grails framework and some of its plugins. Thanks to the friendly and competent help of the development team(s) and fellow grails/groovy users, building and extending AmboCarta.com tarot software is as much fun as it can be. Thanks !

Rainer - http://www.AmboCarta.com

Escapeer.com

  • URL: http://www.escapeer.com
  • Overview: Escapeer.com is an online reservation site for activities. Think Orbitz for sports! Escapeer allows user to book any and all kinds of activities online, from Dance Classes to Kitesurfing. Escapeer is currently focused on the NYC Metro and Northeast region and will be expanding to other cities before the years end. The site is heavily based on Grails. We make use of the JSecurity, GrailsUI and handful of other plugins. Grails allowed us to quickly build what was a complex project and we enjoy the ability to quickly roll out new features as a result of investment in Grails. Our overall experience using Grails has proven it an outstanding and capable web framework that allowed us to build a platform that will handle our current needs and allow us to scale out however needed in the future. Thanks to the core team for an excellent product!

blerp.com

  • Overview: Blerp allows you to start discussions on top of your favorite websites. Unlike typical web comments, authors are in full control and can post a variety of content on any webpage, regardless of whether they permit user feedback.
  • URL: http://www.blerp.com
This website is developed entirely with a Grails backend. While the website concept and features posed a ton of UI challenges (solved primarily via Javascript - thank you JQuery!), the Grails framework has been fantastically simple and straightforward! Grails' code-by-convention and DRY principles in combination with the dynamic language features of Groovy have saved countless hours of development and testing and made the entire solution incredibly agile. Throw in a number of very useful plugins (feed, quartz, background-thread, twitter, fixtures, migration, etc) and we've ended up requiring a fraction of the anticipated development resources. All of this and we can still leverage all of Java!

Having developed Cold Fusion, MS ASP, servlet/JSP, Struts, Tapestry, JBoss SEAM, and even Rails web sites, this is far and away the best framework I have ever used!

Brian Wheeler and Jeremy Leng - http://www.blerp.com

MyBrands.de

MyBrands is using Grails heavily for all kinds of administrative backends. Fast development (scaffolding CRUD views!) lends itself very well to the development of all kinds of admin tools.

Michael Franzkowiak - http://www.mybrands.de

kaufDA.de

  • Overview: Leading location based product search portal for Germany - heavily using Grails, AJAX & Flash
  • URL: http://www.kaufDA.de
www.kaufDA.de helps consumers to find products, sales, retailer stores and many more near by their location. The entire solution is developed with Groovy & Grails providing an AJAX UI, CMS, Data-Mining-Suite and lots more of the finest stuff :)

Cihan Aksakal - http://www.kaufDA.de

XpressMark

XpressMark helps you bookmark your favorite videos from the video sites like youtube, metacafe, veoh, vimeo etc… XpressMark allows you to remember your favorite videos around the web, and share them with everyone. Try it now!

Thanks a lot ot the grails team to have come up with such a great product. Now web development is even more rapid.

Prabhu Beeman http://www.xpressmark.com

GSWord

GSWord online Bible Studio brings the power of J-Sword, E-Sword alike desktop functionality onto web. It exposes the function of J-Sword through Groovy and Grails. Extensive use of AJAX and Comet. There is a link for every Bible Version, book, chapter, verse and word. Yiguang http://rock.ccim.org/gsword

SitOrSquat

  • Overview: The world's leading toilet and facility locator is built on Grails (at least the web and server side :))
  • URL: http://www.sitorsquat.com
Original SitOrSquat was to be a quick and dirty toilet locator and based on the huge amount of growth we've had it's expanded far beyond and gone through MANY rewrites and the core platform being Grails has made it relatively painless. OUr web/serverside hosts iPhone and BlackBerry native version as well and is soon to include an android and Windows Mobile version. Come check it out....

Jon http://www.sitorsquat.com

Manymoon

We built an online To Do List and Project Management application called Manymoon on Grails. The framework helped us quickly develop a simple, working product that we could release to customers and start gathering feedback. Grails made it easy for us to quickly iterate and improve the application based on this feedback. We also liked the integration with Hibernate and Spring since it reduces the amount of time to develop and test code.

We have received great feedback from customers on Manymoon...especially the performance! Manymoon is like Facebook for projects and you can use it today to manage your software development project.

Amit http://www.manymoon.com

Kameleoon

Web design can be hard and time consuming. With Kameleoon, we wanted to make web design accessible to the masses, much as WordPress made blogging very easy. Technical challenges were high due to the fact that Kameleoon had to integrate with any website. However, Grails and Groovy allowed us to come up with clever solutions to any problems we encountered. For this application we mainly used GORM but the underlying Spring architecture with IoC proved very useful as well.

http://www.kameleoon.com

Socialthumbs

"Grails is a serious productivity boost to application development. GORM and Grails plugins, particularly the RichUI plugins were also invaluable. As a result,  Socialthumbs.com developed a collaborative Dilemma-solving application in about two months. While we have much work to do, the application is now in Beta and we're getting raving comments!"

ooper, http://www.socialthumbs.com

Ganttzilla

  • URL: http://www.ganttzilla.com
  • Overview: Ganttzilla is a startup specializing in building and supporting online web solution for project plan documents viewing. File formats supported by Ganttzilla include MPP, MPX and XML created in Microsoft Project of versions 98, 2000, 2003, 2007 and also Planner documents. Ganttzilla provides document versioning capability, sharing and publishing. Initial decision to build service on top Grails/Groovy stack has proven to be the right one - software engineers of the product with strong Java background are pleased with the framework, its capabilties and support. Development process is "technically more agile" with Grails and we will continue using the framework in other projects as well. It was really a bright idea to create such tool within Java world. Thanks!

Internal Project

  • Overview: Grails connected to legacy DB
"We jumped onto Grails about 2 months ago and quickly developed an internal administration web application with it. The Grails app is linked to a legacy database and we were able to reuse the Hibernate HBM files with little or no changes. Grails did not only simplify our web development, we also quickly got into Groovy by doing some *fun* web development. We experienced great support via the Grails User's List, thanx a lot!"

Sven Haiges, Actionality Inc. - Oct 12, 2006

Poker Party Manager

"We first used Grails to develop a provisioning application for one of our clients. With the great facilities provided by Grails, it was a really pleasant experience and the application was developed in a few days with a lot of fun for the developers. We also greatly appreciated the active community and the quickly growing bunch of documentation ! It was so pleasant that I decided to write another Grails application for my own needs : a application to manage the Texas Hold'em No Limit Poker parties that I play with my friends every week. Unfortunately, there is no demo site to show it up but, for those interested, the project is hosted here : http://code.google.com/p/poker-party-manager/ (GUI is still in French but I will soon deal with i18n :-) ...) So thanks a lot to the Grails community !!"
  • Benoit Orihuela, Zenexity - Oct 15, 2006

Internal Project

  • Overview: Grails for rapid prototyping
"I have being evaluating this framework for a project we have to do on my current company, and we will definitely use it. It will allow us to cut development time, and the fact that is so well integrated with sound frameworks like spring, hibernate, sitemesh and quartz, make it a sure bet, despite being still a young project. In the two weeks time we add to evaluate a solution and present a technical proposal to the client, we were able to do the proposal and a fully functional prototype, already with some functionalities implemented. Keep up the good work guys!!",

Pedro Costa - Oct 31, 2006

Groovy in Action Errata

"One thing that I came to value particularly about Grails is that it allows me to create little web applications so quickly. This led me to having a host of little applications both at my clients' sites and at home that I wouldn't even have considered implementing otherwise. One example is the errata collection for the Groovy in Action book. Instead of capturing errata in some document that I would need to carry with me, I just post them to that Grails application from wherever I am. With the help of Grails' scaffolding facility implementing the application only took a few moments and thanks to the standard J2EE deployment the installation was simply done by uploading the war file via the tomcat management console."

Dierk König - Canoo Engineering AG - Jan 17th, 2007

tvvoting.com

"I downloaded Grails a couple months ago. I got really excited as I got into it - every time I went looking for something ('I wish I could do xxx') - it was there! It was also great to know that if I needed to get 'under the covers' of the app it was just a matter of opening the Spring and Hibernate config files and getting to work."

"I've built a few Spring / Hibernate apps in my days and the tools that Grails includes (quartz, HSQLDB, log4j, Sitemesh, jUnit), the power of the Groovy, and the Domain Driven MVC architecture that it suggest make it the quickest and easiest way to get J2EE web applications up and running fast. Plus - the active community is really helpful!"

Jeff Bonnes - TVvoting.com - Jan 23rd 2007

Internal Project

  • Overview: Grails Ajax Lookup Tables
I deployed a simple Grails CRUD application for some look-up data sets at work (each of the order of several-hundred thousand rows). No messing around with Spring or Hibernate configuration - I specified how the data would be stored in Oracle 9i using the Grails domain classes. So simple.

Or course, because this was so easy, I was free to spend some more time improving the application. First up was adding the excellent Searchable plug-in which, with a one-liner added a Lucene/Compass search to all my data.

Next I cooked up some GSP tags and used Prototype/Scriptaculous to enrich and ease the data entry/modification experience.

Along the way I received a lot of help from the Grails community which was an added bonus.

Grails rocks. Programming isn't normally this fun.

Nic Doye - 4th July 2007

Globby.de

I've written a whole AJAX enabled web application from scratch in only 10 weeks of leisure time (having a wife + 2 kids) and I just have to admit its awesome. Before Grails I went down the java/jsp/jdo path and was stumbling across Zope3 (which is honestly - and sorry for that - nothing but quite awful IMHO).  Having wasted much time on building indices and query strategies for ZODB and bothering about not having JMX at hand, I finally got back to RDBMS + JVM pleasures. No TAL or JSP anymore - I finally found the (holy) Grail of Groovy, Grails and of course Java - because its the mix that makes it - and a really stunning boost in productivity, too.

Of course I had some minor pitfalls with GORM and also small headaches with Searchable, but after all it was nothing that couldn't be solved in couple of hours of head scratching and a good night sleep. Its really astounding how much one can achieve in almost no time having the right framework at hand. Using Searchable for the full text search capabilities (now with inheritance support - thanks maurice:-) ) and Grails, the whole project went live in almost no time and is using some really nice features, such as SWFUpload (which was not quite simple, as Flash doesn't handle the server session properly), rich-text inline editing using FCKEditor and of course a whole bunch more of AJAX and DHTML. And the best thing is, it also works with crappy IE (which of course was a struggle again). Having prototype and scriptaculous integrated in Grails is really a great thing (even though I recently favor jQuery which has not been integrated yet).

Grails + Searchable are the best tools I've seen in my career (almost 8 years of webdev) to write a fully fledged web application without getting throbbing temples about wasted time and effort. Its a framework that just works and allows us to write webapps at a really pleasant pace.

Thanks for that!

Sven Schomaker - 23rd July 2007

washeilt.de

"We wanted to implement a platform for user experiences with alternative medicine. Because we had a limited budget we looked for a way to implement it more efficient than with Java and the usual change-build-deploy-test cycles. First we tested Ruby on Rails than we discovered Groovy and Grails so we could leverage our existing Java knowledge. It took us less than a month to create the first version and to get online. Thanks to the rapid prototyping features we can release an improved and extended version every week. Thanks for enabling us to start our own Web 2.0 adventure."

Thomas Bayer - washeilt.de - 12Th July 2007

Planet-RIA

"We do quite a lot of Groovy and Grails at Canoo. The more we use it, the better we like it. There are so many opportunities of building a valuable web application that we would not be able to realize if Grails wouldn't deliver results so quickly.

Our main expertise is about Rich Internet Applications (RIA), where we offer consulting, engineering, and our flagship product ULC. There is a lot of information about RIA on the web and in blogs, but there wasn't a single hub that links to it. So we used Grails to built it. It is based on Glen's excellent work for groovyblogs and aggregates all known RSS/ATOM feeds on the topic and presents it as both HTML and RSS/ATOM."

Dierk König - Planet RIA - 31st August 2007

Internal Project

  • Overview: Grails replacing Excelsheets
We implemented two applications using Grails. In both projects the exchange of excel sheets via mail is replaced by a web application.

Using Grails was the right decision, as we wouldn't choose other technologies (spring, hibernate ,etc.) anyway.

Grails saved us from writing boiler-plate code, and the wiki documentation was helpful, when we had some detailed questions.

Both applications are db-centric webapplications, thus Grails matches perfectly!

Bernhard Huber, Unisys Austria - 7th January 2008

Justhuman.org

  • Overview: Grails for Just Human
  • URL: link removed (domain parked)
We have set up in only 4 days a grails application on justhuman.org. The site lets you enter a question about any religion or any topic regarding a religion and institutions or priests or whoever feels competent can answer these questions. Other users then can rate the answers and comment them. Answers with the most votings will be promoted to the top of the answer list.

Grails is an outstanding framework. I work for a long time as j2EE consultant and programmer here in Germany. I saw many frameworks during my career and actually i am working with JSF at a clients site. It is really hard to work with the beautiful technologies groovy and grails at home and then switch again to JSF and Struts at work and see how much time you are wasting in writing boilerplate and repeating code. Every serious Java-Developer should have a look at grails and groovy. It is definitively the future of Java!

Masiar Ighani, Germany - 9th January 2008

Djigadget.org

I recently hear about a new java framework which is grails. So I try to implement my new website using grails. Grails is very outstanding, it was easy and very intuitive, definitely bring back my enthusiasm to make a website using java and grails.

bayuadji, Indonesia - 11st February 2008

Internal Projects

  • Overview: Grails for Internal Webapps
I started out with Java web development about four years ago using Struts 1.x. The project we were working on was an internal website for running data processing workflows and had about 50 users or so. I thought Struts was a pretty cool framework at the time.

I'm now using Grails for another internal website with about 20 users max. It has me saying, "why couldn't I have had this four years ago!" It brings together so many of the established technologies that I've wanted to use but never had the time to learn individually (Spring, Hibernate, Ajax). It also brings together many technologies I've never heard of before. And Grails does it in a way that makes them easy to use IMHO (compared to wiring everything together manually with Struts).

Also, Groovy is awesome. In my case, with about 20 internal customers, performance isn't that big of a deal so I'm not really worried about the dynamic nature of the language. I also love that it's essentially Java++ - I can reuse all of my old Java syntax and know that it'll work. Where I have time, I can upgrade to all of the cool Groovy features. My favorite thing though is that it cuts out nearly all of the boilerplate code I've had to write before.

I'm pretty sold on Grails. :-)

Matt Lachman, Rochester, NY USA - 7th March 2008

TeamSpider

Two it-agile developers (one with little Grails experience, one only read a book) startet a demo project to learn more about Grails. The domain of the project was TeamSpider, an assessment service for agile projects. Though production ready quality was not a project goal, a production ready system was delivered within a few days. And the developers had a lot of fun within the project.

One of the big suprises of the project was the absence of big obstacles, that we often experienced when adopting new technologies. Grails has very clear and easy to understand concepts that made it very easy to learn.

The application is available at: http://teamspider.it-agile.de (GUI is available only in German by now).

Stefan Roock, Hamburg, Germany - 18th March 2008

Symbolic

Symbolic is a web application, made with grovvy/grails, which aim to simplify the management within complex enterprise infrastructures. Symbolic is designed as front-end of Fedora Unified Network Controller (Func) and allow to manage a huge quantity of machines, networks and environments.

Symbolic supports LDAP and local authentication, allow control of wide variety of clients (hosts, guests and clusters), provide a completely compatible interface with func API framework, simplify user and operations management by using a fully customizable ACLs.

Byte-Code, April 2008

Neofonie

In June 2007 a customer entrusted us with the implementation of a rating community in the medical sector. Due to the very short amount of time given (about two and a half month), a short evaluation phase and our background as a JAVA-based company the choice came to using Grails for the project. As the project launched in September 2007, the choice was proved as being the right one. After some initial problems with a few plugins in production environment, the platform now runs rock-solid.

This success story influenced the choice of Grails for further projects in a positive way. Right now a few bigger projects are in development using at least partly Grails.

Florian Kuhlmann, Berlin, Germany - July 2008

Dynamic Jasper Reports

I've developed a full feature CRUD database driven web reporting application using Grails and Jasper Report in my spear time. There's no long hours of configuration or dealing with the web.xml file. Grails is easy to install and works without any additional configuration. Ahhh, now that's what I'm talking about an easy and powerful framework to work with.

Database Driven Jasper Report or dbdjasperreport, is an on-demand web reporting application that could serve as a central report repository and gives an organization the ability to have multiple environment, provided you have a Development, Test and Production web server environment. dbdjasperreport is designed to integrate with any web application. It has a unique Report Module which provides flexible filter options for each parameter that's defined by you. Example of operator filter options are <, >, <=, between, starts with, and contains, etc. You can also define a code list for selection, inject image and RTF file to your report, and gives you the ability to define searches for a parameter. Examples of searches that you can define are employee, vendor, or product searches.

This is an open source project which you can download, configure and use with your existing web application or as a stand alone application. Check it out, don't waste your time developing your own reporting application when there's already one that's free for your use.

Kue Vang aka Kou Vang: Madison, Wisconsin - Sept 2008

SpiceClix

I wanted a useful real-world example to learn how to use Groovy/Grails. What better example than a dating site? I was working in my spare time and did not really have a lot of time to mess around with traditional frameworks that require a lot of configuration. I really appreciate the ease of Grails DRY principles, the speed of its coding-by-convention and the handiness of the Groovy syntax. It is still very rough around the edges and you dont have to look to closely to see many elements of the default RAD skin :-)

Deji Omisore (dom5454@yahoo.com): Atlanta, GA - October 12 2008

ContentSieve & Vertical Search

At MetaSieve we first used Rails for an eCommerce solution as well as for prototyping. Although working with Rails was great at first one problem remained: Essentially being a Java shop and relying on various libraries like Hibernate, Spring and Lucene we basically would always have had to write glue code in addition to the actual Ruby and Java code.

In 2007 we came across a shiny new web application framework called Grails that used standard Java libraries like Hibernate and Spring for establishing principles like DRY and Convention over Configuration. Our company so far has used Grails for our vertical search engine GameSear.ch, its several spin-offs and our widget service ContentSieve. We intend to use it for everything else that's leaving our shop at least in the near to mid-term future.

With Grails we have found a web application framework that suits our needs in pretty much every respect:

  • DRY and Convention over Configuration
  • Being able to write code in a dynamically typed language like Groovy and a statically typed language like Java just as needed
  • Being able to draw upon the huge amount of mature third-party software that's available for free in the Java eco-system
Björn Wilmsmann (bjoern@metasieve.com): Bochum, Germany, 13 October 2008

YourDiveBook

Together with a friend of mine we had the idea to build an online scuba dive logbook. With no experience in developing web applications, I was very happy to find grails. I was very impressed how easy the first steps with grails were and how fast even more complicated tasks could be accomplished.

Kilian Bartholome (webmaster@yourdivebook.com): Freiburg, Germany - January 5 2008

Clipboard2Web

Clipboard2Web is a small application to make pasting images from the clipboard to web applications more easy.

Stefan Roock, Hamburg, Germany, 05-feb-2009

Raumobile.de

In June 2008 the portal company Raumobil started creating projects with Grails. First this step was encouraged by a small projekt work with Ruby on Rails. Due to having the backend in Java and the frontend in Spring MVC and JSP porting to Grails was quite easy. It showed up to be more powerful and less time consuming in creating new views and taglibs. The application can be watched at facebook: After these first successful steps using Grails we were encouraged to use the technology for further projects, which have been finished in quite a short amount of time: Of course there were different problems during development (especially because we wanted to use Eclipse for debugging and we had the goal in mind to never restart the application), where a little more documentation could have helped, but now we got a closer look inside the framework base. I love it!

Manfred Mayer, Karlsruhe, Germany - February 2008

Yoly (Your Online You)

This new startup wanted to get to market quickly and with limited time, and an idea, the team decided on quickly prototyping their Social Centering application on Grails. they quickly found that grails can be the platform for production as well.

The largest challenge was understanding all of the tools that are out there to support the new language. Maven, TestNG, Eclipse, Netbeans, Groovy Test Case, all have pluses and minuses. Working through some of these issues have taken more time than we had hoped but we now are happy with the new Maven, Groovy Test Cases, and are looking forward to a better Eclipse integration.

Terrance Pulway, Boston, MA terry@yoly.com http://www.yoly.com

Internal Application

  • Overview: Migrated an old Struts application to a shiny new Grails one
The old system was build on Java 1.4, OC4J 10.1.2 and Struts 1.1 I migrated the system over to Grails by following these steps:
  1. Upgraded to Struts 1.3
  2. Migrated the infrastructure to Tomcat 6 and Java 6
  3. Created a new Grails app (version 1.0.3)
  4. Installed the Struts 1 plugin
  5. Copied the old application into the web app directory and the Java source directory.
One of the benefits of having Spring in the background is the great enterprise integration features that come with it. I was able to get the system working with some of Oracle DB's advanced features.

Thanks Graeme and Guillame for making a great technology!

Tom Gullo, Washington DC http://www.tomgullo.com

Goal98 Team Manager

Soccer fans in big city, such as Shanghai, have to join a temporary team to rent soccer fields if they want to play on weekends. Grassroots soccer clubsteams are emerging. Most of team leaders use excel even paper to manager the costs, funds, players and activities of their team.

To help those team leaders, I use my spare time and develop this website with awesome Grails framework. Team leaders could create activities for their team. Members of the team are able to know the venue, costs and attendees of the next coming soccer activity. Grails with acegi, richui and mail plugins help me build this website in short time and small effort.

Thanks all grails developers and THE GREAT GRAILS!

Liu Chao, Shanghai China liuchao@goal98.com http://team.goal98.com

IDMLlib

IDMLlib is a library that enables you to work with IDML Documents without actually knowing anything about it. With a few lines of code you can access everything within an IDML document.

The library save your programmers countless hours trying to figure out how to access page items. With the IDMLlib you can focus on your product or service while we maintain the high quality of the IDMLlib.

Our aim was to develop a website that adjusted our special needs. A flexible, extensible and robust website.

Peyman Pouryekta, Essen Germany http://IDMLlib.com

Scoremind

Scoremind provides predictive models OnDemand for managing customer life cycle, in minutes you can have an analytical tool to manage activities of retention, upselling and crosselling.

David Blanco http://www.scoremind.com

Componentix

Componentix provides custom software development services, focusing on Java, Grails, iPhone. We used Grails to put together dynamic capabilities for our website quickly. We implemented portfolio, blog, page to make project requests. Grails scaffolding features allowed to get admin panel for site almost without effort.

Vladimir Grichina http://www.componentix.com

Cry From The Cubicles

Cry From The Cubicles was conceived to be a place to express one's own or to view others workplace angst or humor. We are a very lightweight team, consisting of one developer (myself) and a graphic designer. When deciding on a technology to use, we needed something that would offer extreme RAD, extreme agility, familiarity to a java developer, view-centricity (lots of ajax) and scalability should the idea hit.

Grails has worked extremely well in filling the first four of those needs, and seems prepared to meet the fifth should it be required to do so. It has definitely been the best tool for our particular scenario. We have been able to beat our timelines and respond quickly as changes have been required. In particular, the rich set of plugins (acegi, mail, email confirmation, quartz, ui-performance, searchable, cookie) that we have been able to leverage have really accelerated our development.

Lance Woodson (lance@cryfromthecubicles.com) - 6/29/2010 Salt Lake City, UT

FirmowePapiery.pl - Grails for invoicing software

In the beginning of 2008 Espeo Software decided to create new project - an invoicing application. As experienced java programmers, using mostly Spring and Hibernate based solutions, we were searching for new technologies to speed up development process and actually learn new things. When we found Grails, it was obvious that this is the natural way for us to move.

Because of lack of proper documentation and also our decision to go with Flex based user interface, the beginning wasn't easy for us, we had to do a lot of investigation about using those technologies on our own. After some time development with Grails started to work very smoothly and we were extremely happy with increase of our productivity and lowering development expenses.

This success encouraged us to use Grails for future projects, including:

  • e-commerce engine
  • accounting office management system
Now we can for sure say that Grails is our key technology.

Sylwia Rogowicz, sylwia.rogowicz@espeo.pl, Espeo Software, Poznan, Poland

0and1.ru

  • Overview: Russian electronics online shop with great offers
  • URL: http://0and1.ru/
I love Grails. I think this is the best web platform. Some features that we used are great. These are GORM and templates. I can make simple architecture using GORM mapping and inheritance. Templates help me make view parts reusable. Many thanks to the Grails team!

Stanislav Feldman http://0and1.ru/

Home Loan Enterprise

Grails has enabled us to develop a mortgage website in the shortest time possible while remaining competitive and scalable. So far the site performance is great, the infrastructure is solid, and the availability of countless plugins is priceless. At Home Loan Enterprise, we are 100% Groovy and Grails using STS as our IDE. So far so great! Look out Real Estate and Mortgage industry more innovative products and services to come!

The Silver Jewellery Store

We needed an online store system, complete with payment gateway integration and administrative back-end, for our new silver jewellery business but couldn't find anything that handled the oddities of a jewellery web site (customers wanting to change the type/length of a chain associated with a pendant etc). We decided to write our own system using Grails. From concept to working site, including administrative back-end, it took four developer months. This relatively short development cycle was only possible due to the use of Grails throughout.

Paul Fernley - http://www.silver-jewellery.uk.com

ThinkVidya.com

  • Overview: Online resource for finding all learning options for children, youngsters and adults in India.
  • URL: http://www.thinkvidya.com
We are a small team and we needed to build the web based service as quickly as possible. Grails has been the best platform that I have ever worked on. It reduces the development time at least in half. There is also a lot less code so the code maintenance cost goes down. We would not have been able to move so fast without the help of grails. Thanks a lot to the team behind the Grails project.

Rakesh Kalra- Co-founder - http://www.thinkvidya.com

Yeay.me

  • Overview: Yeay.me is a product recommendation service based on identified purchase behaviour pattern of user and his social graph.
  • URL: http://yeay.me
Yeay.me is a small startup that uses grails for building a product recommendation service. Grails was used by us for the 1st time and we're very pleased with it. It offers us the power of Java platform without sacrificing development speed and resources. We need that power but we're limited in resources right now. Thanks for the great job Grails team!

Vladislav Namasco - Founder - http://yeay.me

Gutscheinrabatte.com

  • Overview: Gutscheinrabatte.com is a innovatove voucher service where everyone can share coupons with the community on our site.
  • URL: http://www.gutscheinrabatte.com
We are a new mid-sized startup with a limited budget and we looked for a way to implement or plattform more efficient than with Java and the usual change-build-deploy-test cycles. First we tested Ruby on Rails than we discovered Groovy and Grails so we could leverage our existing Java knowledge. Grails made it easy for us to quickly iterate and improve the application based on this feedback. We were also stunned as we saw it works also great with the IE, every other platform lately here made some trouble. It's easy and makes much fun developing with Grails, thanks to the hole Grails Team.

Maik Schmidt - Founder - http://www.gutscheinrabatte.com

Spotdiving.com

  • Overview: SpotDiving is a new diving community, offering users to keep their scuba diving logbook online.
  • URL: http://www.spotdiving.com
SpotDiving uses Grails as the foundation for their new Google Maps Mashup. Connecting easily with various Geolocation services, Facebook and Google Maps, combined with the power of Java is the reason why we would always choose Grails. Developing a complex application that allows divers to manage their scuba diving logbook online was never so easy.

SpotDiving Team http://www.spotdiving.com

Lusini.de

Lusini.de is the leading German B2B marketplace for the hospitality sector. More than 100 Merchants merchants and manufacturers have already uploaded more than 150.000 products on the platform. We are using Grails as a product enrichment platform allowing us to maintain, update and change products according to our quality standards before they are imported in our ecommerce shop system. With Grails we have found the perfect framework for our needs and we will definetly consider it for further projects. Thanks to all Grails developers!

Lusini.de Tech Team http://www.lusini.de