Guillaume Laforge >> I sincerely think Grails is “the thing”, as you say. First of all, Groovy has the feel of Java – with its Java-like syntax – and gives Grails dynamic capabilities that Java counterparts can’t have. Grails builds upon excellent components such as Spring, Hibernate and SiteMesh, to create a full-blown environment for developing applications quickly, and it will let you focus on the business tasks rather than wasting time with some boilerplate code our long and tedious configuration files that could’ve been avoided with a good “convention over configuration” paradigm as popularized by Rails.

"I sincerely think Grails is “the thing”..."

With Grails, you write simple Groovy beans for your domain classes, and they are persisted to the database automatically. Groovy decorates those beans to give them some additional dynamic methods such as save(), delete() or findByXxxx() without making the beans implement or extend any base class, thus leaving your objects free of any dependencies upon the framework itself.

You can write your services and have automatic injection of dependent services by just declaring the service you rely on. It’s also very easy to build controllers and actions with injection of services, and also with scaffolded actions like list/create/edit/etc for your CRUD-oriented apps.Grails is really a very promising framework that will truly increase your productivity.

"Grails is really a very promising framework that will truly increase your productivity..."

IndicThreads >> How suited is Groovy for enterprise development? Are you planning any replacements for JSP, Servlets and EJBs?

Guillaume Laforge >> Critical applications are already deployed in production spiced up with some Groovy scripts and classes. For example: a fortune 500 insurance company in the USA has deployed such an application, a London-based financial institution too, some high-traffic websites do use Groovy too.

We’re not planning on replacing anything. We prefer building upon something and bringing more agility in the process of using this or that technology. To add a Groovy-feel if you wish! There are very good components or libraries, and it would be a waste of time to try and make something new. We prefer looking from the shoulder of the giants.

The sole replacement there could be is Grails’ GSP: Groovy Server Pages. It’s Grails own version of JSPs. And it goes beyond JSPs in terms of functionality. First by letting you write scriptlets in Groovy, and also because it supports some special Grails dynamic tag libraries, but can still use JSP tag libs too.

IndicThreads >> Thanks Guillaume for this groovy interview. Readers can keep up with Guillaume through his blog at glaforge.free.fr/weblog.

Guillaume Laforge >> That’s been a pleasure to answer this interview! Thanks a lot. 2006 should be a Groovy year, with the release of our final version of Groovy, and the first releases of Grails, our web application framework. Some books will also hit the shelves in a few months. Dierk Koenig, Andrew Glover are finishing the last chapters of “Groovy in Action”, for Manning. And as shown on my blog, there will be an excellent coverage of Groovy at JavaOne 2006!

(little correction, the best URL for my blog is this one: http://glaforge.free.fr/blog/groovy that’s the one with Groovy content)

Related:
>> BEA to support scripting languages
>> Java apps can incorporate scripting language programs
>> Introduction To Groovy @ The IndicThreads Pune Java Meet
>> I'm a big fan of scripting as much as possible

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