By Dave Klein

You've heard about how easy it is to build web apps with Grails. Maybe you've even seen the simple CRUD app in a blink of an eye, but do you want to see what Grails is really capable of? Then join us as we walk through the construction of a real web application with this powerful framework. Along the way we'll see how to take advantage of Grails' features like GORM, service classes, custom tags, and URL mapping.

You'll be amazed at how quickly you can become productive with Grails, not just because of scaffolding but because of the power of “Convention over Configuration,” sensible defaults, and the dynamic goodness of Groovy - all applied to a suite of the best tools in the industry, such as Spring, Hibernate, Tomcat, Ant, Sitemesh, JUnit, and more.

By Dave Klein

One of the most compelling features of Grails is it's custom tag libraries. Yet many developers, especially those coming from a JSP or JSF background, run from the room screaming when someone suggests creating a custom tag. Grails custom tag libraries are a powerful way to encapsulate business logic and keep code out of our pages. They are also great for declaring intent and making pages more readable. But here's the best part... they are ridiculously easy to create.

We will have a brief tutorial on creating Grails custom tags and then build a few to demonstrate just how easy it can be to tap into this powerful feature. We will also see how we can bundle our custom tags into a Grails plugin to reuse in our other projects or to share with the community.