[Update 2007-07-21] - To try out a working sample application using a legacy schema with a more recent version of Grails, check out this post from the "Grokking GORM" series.

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So you've heard about Grails and its promise to bring the power of Ruby on Rails to the Java platform. If you're like me, you stand in pure awe of the innovation and power illustrated by Rails, but know that your organization just isn't going to stray from the safety of Java. So if we can achieve similar productivity with a more Java-centric solution, what's not to like? And the more conservative businesses should find additional comfort knowing that Grails applications play nicely with their existing Java code, because Grails applications are written in Groovy (a dynamically-typed scripting language that also happens to be a Java standard).

Grails is still in its infancy (with version 0.1 being the current stable release), but it's slam-packed with many more features than you might expect given its youth, and I expect it to mature rapidly over the next few months. The development team has established an aggressive road map to continue to progress Grails as a solid and rich web development framework.

That all sounds good, but will it work with your legacy databases? If you're familiar with Rails, you know that its convention over configuration approach (which Grails shares) is best suited to greenfield applications where the database schema can be defined to follow the preferred conventions. Shoehorning a legacy database into such a framework, while it can be done, takes away some of that feeling of elegance you get from working with a purely-conforming schema. That said, I was surprised by how little tweaking is required to wrap Grails around a non-conforming legacy schema. Care to see for yourself? Let's get started… Read the rest of this entry »