What's Groovy about Grails!

This post is a written version of my short presentation about Groovy and Grails. The advantage is that I can link to some external resources to give you more information to pursue. I expect that you have some computer programming experience, and you know what variables, statements, functions, and subroutines are. Many folks in my audience have a structured or procedural programming background so I am going to argue in favor of the object-oriented concepts that Grails depends on.

Grails & STS: Avoiding Build Problems

This post has been updated to reflect new information about how Java launches, the release of Grails 2.4.0 on May 21, 2014, and to introduce a section on using Grails in a team environment with a source-code management system.

I recently started to experience some very interesting issues with Groovy, Grails, and STS/GGTS while I was teaching some recent classes. I believe that most of them boiled down to idiosyncrasies on the computers in the classroom, and really most of them appeared when the students used their own computers.

So I decided to undertake a quest to find out what happens when you use Groovy, Grails, and then throw STS into the mix. Yes, I really did have to say "a quest." Anyways, it turns out that the rules are actually simple, but the folks at Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and Pivotal (these are only ordered alphabetically) assumed that you would either not need them or learn by osmosis what they are. The good news is: you can manage multiple installed versions of Groovy, Grails, and most importantly Java, you just have to know what affects them!

By the way, even if you are not interested in the problems with Groovy and Grails, the first two sections are also very important for Java programming.

Really, it's Controller-Model-View!

We have all had our moments when folks are talking about some idea and treat it as such an obvious thing that we are too embarrassed to say that we do not know about it! Well, model-view-controller or MVC as it is called is one of those things that pops up in application development that we think everyone understands. Let's fix that here!