My last article about simple Grails application showed, that for quick development Grails are one of top choices. Inspired by some folks writing all around the web, that Grails plus GAE are even faster web-development solutions, I’ve decided to give it a try. And that’s where troubles came up.

In our last article about Grails we promised some tutorial showing how easy and simple it is to create web application in this framework. So – let’s do it!

From this place you can download project files ready-to-use.

In this little ‘How-To’ I’m going to use NetBeans, since it has an excellent support for Grails applications. First of all – let’s create new Grails project: ‘File’ -> ‘New Project’ -> ‘Groovy’ -> ‘Grails Application’. NetBeans will ask for a folder placement of our newly created project and will automaticly build whole project folder structure for us. Actually, we can even run our project right now – and we can see in the browser that it works.

After a short look the answer is yes. But after a little deeper digging into Groovy and Grails, I must admit that I’m simply surprised! Not only by its simplicity but also because of its decent features and the fact that Grails combines all the best from both Ruby on Rails and Java. If you worked with this couple, you should be curious by now.

From yesterday we can enjoy the newest version of a great Java Enterprise development tool. And as Rod Johnson promised in April – it’s fully free. In this release – actually first one with decent enhancements since STS was made free – we can find really nice stuff. It supports Spring 3.0, offers inbuilt wizards for Spring projects, beans and XML files, graphical configuration editor, Spring Roo project wizard and dev shell for Rapid Application Development, Spring Web Flow and Spring Batch visual development tools.