Grails - It really is the holy grail
Until recently, my favorite technology was Hibernate - it seemed to magically solve an important problem. On the other hand, I was totally unimpressed by Spring. But I have a new favorite and a new respect for Spring - this is because I have discovered Groovy and Grails (buiilt on Spring)
The journey started when I read "Ruby on Rails" and I loved the concept but couldn't grasp Ruby. So when I heard that Groovy on Grails was more suited toward Java developers, I couldn't wait to try it. Eventually I stumbled across a project - an allowance system - and built that in Grails. And then I built a Gift List system in Grails. And, as far as I am concerned, I won't be using any other development framework. No more EJB or Struts for me. Grails is just far more productive and Groovy is fast and intuitive.
My main complaint is that Ecipse does not have a particularly good Groovy editor (I am using the standard plugin) but I want (or need) more in the way of code completion.
But auto-reload is a dream, smooth integration into Java, Hibernate's ability to create/maintain the DB, the philosophy of "convention over configuration" has a tremendous appeal to me - as I have always hated the layering of J2EE apps to provide for "future flexibility" (that never seemed to materialize).
The reason that I am posting this now is so that I can start posting very short lessons from my Grails adventures - mostly so I don't forget.