One of the best features of the Grails platform is that its modular architecture makes developing plugins very easy. As a result, hundreds of plugins have already been developed and made available in the standard repository, with the number growing almost daily.

Learn the basics of Groovy through a series of small, but non-trivial, examples. Rather than simply survey the language, in this talk we'll walk through a series of use cases to see how Groovy is used in practice to solve problems. The goal is to help Java developers who haven't seen much of Groovy get up to speed on the fundamentals.