In order for any new framework to prove its worth, it first needs a few real-world honest-to-goodness success stories under its belt.  And why not?  After all, who wants to spend all their time chasing the newest fad, only to be disappointed by the hype 95% of the time?  And for web frameworks, we want to see something with a public face, and it means even more when that face also has a reputable brand name attached to it. 

Meet www.copellafruitjuices.co.uk.  Copella, one of PepsiCo UK's well-known juice brands, recently launched a site built from scratch using Grails.  Marc Palmer described the application on the Grails mailing list, and mentions that this is just the first iteration of the site and that we should expect enhancements over the next month.  Still, it looks pretty darn good and is quite functional given the fact that it was developed in a matter of days, not months.  On his blog, Marc also talks more about the timeline for developing the site and where Grails really gave some awesome productivity boosts.  Many thanks to Marc for really putting Grails to the test (as that only serves to make it better in the long run) and for sharing his experience with the Grails community.

Copella's site is a big step for Grails, and the list only continues to grow.  Late last year, we saw the launch of aboutGroovy.com, a cool Groovy and Grails news portal written completely in Grails.  (How's that for eating your own dog food?!) 

And just last week, we saw the launch of another new Grails site; this time with an interesting twist.  tvvoting.com describes itself as "Fantasy Football for Reality TV."  (They describe the concept in more detail on their site.  Be sure to note the cool "Powered by Grails" logo.)  I'm not much of a reality TV fan, but the site certainly looks sharp, and it sounds like it's got a good bit of action going on behind the scenes.  (If you get a chance to try it out, feel free to drop a comment on the Grails mailing list and let us know what you think.)

Kudos to all these folks for showing off what Grails has to offer!