Dynamic scripting languages are a powerful addition to a software designer’s toolbox. Rails/Ruby and Python have not gained much acceptance in the enterprise. Grails and Groovy are an attempt to bridge the gap between the modern scripting world and the Enterprise Java world. This talk is an introduction towards building web applications in Grails.

Spring’s support for scripting languages allows you to extend your Java applications with beans defined in a scripting language, such as Groovy. Spring container transparently instantiates, configure and dependency injects the beans across these supported languages. Beans defined in a scripting language like Groovy come with some handy advantages such as ability to “refresh” the already loaded Groovy classes when the underlying source files change.

Grails 1.2 has been released with new features like Dependency Resolution DSL, Named Query Support, Improved Performance & Memory Consumption, Named URL Mappings, Refactored Testing Infrastructure, Pluggable Web Containers. In addition to these there are hundreds of smaller additions, improvements and bug fixes.

Grails is one of the many web frameworks for the Java platform. However it shines through by its ability to use the best ideas from the Ruby on Rails world while at the same time continuing to leverage the tried, tested and trusted Java platform as well as established frameworks like Spring and Hibernate. With Grails’ tight integration with Java, Groovy based features, growing popularity and improved support from IDEs, Grails looks poised to become the RAD framework of choice for the Java platform.

Grails web application framework has released version 1.1.1 and now officially supports the Google App Engine. This seems like all the more reason for developers to adopt Groovy & Grails.

Rob James is the CTO of Aegeon and one of the earliest adopters of Groovy and Grails for real world software. In this interview with IndicThreads he tells us why Aegeon chose Groovy and Grails to build their enterprise web2 & social networking product, Spaceo.us. He talks of the challenges in getting web2 and social media ideas into enterprise software. He also shares when one should consider using emerging technologies and how to go about adopting them.