Grails as a platform for enterprise open-source

"Since early 2008 we develop one of the few truly vertical enterprise open-source projects: PillarOne, sponsored by Munich Re, one of the largest reinsurance companies worldwide. We leverage the power of Groovy and Grails combined with the ULC Plugin to bring enterprise software characteristics to the field of risk management applications for insurance companies. We not only enjoy the ease of web application development but use Grails for its platform benefits in the first place. The excellent plugin system allows us to easily break our code in manageable pieces and support user-defined extensions to the system - e.g. custom made reserving methods!"

Markus Stricker http://www.intuitive-collaboration.com/

Dierk König http://www.canoo.com

May, 13th 2008

Decision making in Grails

"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

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

Grails for business and leisure

"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

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

Grails for errata management and other everyday tasks

"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

Grails for 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

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

 Grails for 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

Health Care Platform with Grails

"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

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

Grails for http://www.justhuman.org

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

Grails for http://www.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

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

Grails for Team-Radar

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 Team-Radar, 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://teamradar.it-agile.de (GUI is available only in German by now).

Stefan Roock, Hamburg, Germany - 18th March 2008

Grails for Network Administration : Symbolic

Symbolic is a web application 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.

The application is available at: http://www.opensymbolic.org

Luca Foppiano, Milan, Italy,  14 May 2008