Grails brings the powerful "coding by convention" paradigm to Groovy and Java. Grails is not just another flavor in the pool of web development frameworks for Java. Grails leverages the powerful dynamic features of Groovy while taking advantage of best of breed technologies like Hibernate, Spring, Sitemesh and Quartz to make web application development both fun and easy.

This session will demonstrate how easy it is to get a simple application up and running with almost no effort and then evolve that application by adding features to really show off the power of the Grails framework. Topics include:

• Grails Quick Start
• The Grails Command Line Tools
• GORM and Hibernate
• Groovy Server Pages (GSP)
• Spring Integration
• Unit Testing
• Functional Testing

Grails represents technology that offers great flexibility and power without the complexity introduced by other Java web application frameworks. Custom tag libraries are a snap. GSP Templates provide a simple mechanism for reusing UI elements. Sitemesh is integrated to help provide a consistent presentation across the entire application. Grails provides simple mechanisms for leveraging the power of Ajax.

This session will cover all of these topics to demonstrate how powerful the Grails framework is and show how little effort it takes to build not just a simple toy application but also to build real enterprise web apps.