Testimonials

Grails 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!

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

mybetamail.com

I started using grails a few months back and it was so light weight and so simple that i decided my next project should be on that.I gradually started working on this project in my spare time and i completed this project within a month and i was so thrilled at the end to see the site glaring. Updates on the plugins are the best and each time you visit the grails site there would be a new development. I strongly recommend people to take a look at this architecture.

Predeep Ravi - http://mybetamail.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

  • URL: http://www.AmboCarta.com
  • Overview: AmboCarta offers virtual card tables for live cartomancy. It runs completly in a browser with a mix of html and Adobe Flex.
To read cards to other people, you can either be there physically or have somebody call you to read cards to her/him. With AmboCarta, it's possible to actually perform the card reading as if you were there. Cartomancers can extend their services to their customers by a visual component, the virtual card table. Now it's possible for customers to shuffle cards, pick a card, cut piles, and really be part of their reading. Also for teaching or learning cartomancy, AmboCarta offers everything you need to follow your way of handling your cards. There's a free trial period for cartomancers, no strings attached. Available languages so far are english and german. 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 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

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.

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

Shoopz

"We wanted to develop an e-commerce platform where customers could browse the shops as fast as possible. Architecturing a full Ajax site is an interesting challenge. Coupled with the Prototype JavaScript library, Grails excellent JSON support, MVC architecture and solid bases (Spring, Sitemesh, Hibernate...) allowed us to develop our Shoopz platform exactly as we planned. Now that we master Grails, adding features is amazingly fast (and fun too!). Oh, and the support on the mailing lists is excellent..."

elvanör, http://www.shoopz.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 Oracle Security labels. When using Oracle Security Labels each user must have their own database connection. I was able to use Spring's UserCredentialsDataSourceAdapter to make this work.

Thanks Graeme and Guillame for making a great technology!

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

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