Grails in Action

Chapter 2. The Groovy essentials

This chapter covers

• Introducing Groovy
• Differences between Java and Groovy
• Groovy’s dynamic features

Grails is a great framework that removes much of the drudgery from the development of web applications. You have already seen how easy it is to get a usable application up and running from scratch. A large part of that productivity gain comes from using Groovy as the main language for Grails development.

This chapter aims to be a primer for Java developers, covering basics that will be useful for following the rest of the book. The pace is fast, but you don’t have to understand everything in one go. In fact, we encourage you to refer back to this chapter as your experience grows and you need to dig a bit deeper ...