I startet trying Grails by reading the Quick Start Tutorial. That’s nice to get a very trivial application running, but it was not enoough for me. So I read across the other tutorials, and tried some, but they did not really satisfy me.

So after some search I found one of those nice free e-books from InfoQ, one of my favorite sources for technical news, presentations, interviews, articles and tutorials about Java & Co. They published the book “Getting Started with Grails”, which can be downloaded as e-book for free or purchased as print version. There is also a presentation about the content of the book (one hour).

The book is written in tutorial style or “learning by example” as called by the author. For me it is just the tutorial I was looking for. Great!

Today I started my fourth attempt to build and run a simple Hello World Application in Groovy. I failed using Grails 0.4 and 0.5.something because it just did not work and I did not get any help. Because these were premature version I tried using grails 1.0.rc4, but on my new machine. It failed too. But as I know now, because of configuration and windows permission issues.

Now I was successful! But it is very hard if you try to develop grails, while being no local admin. The problem is not Grails itself, but my lack of windows knowledge. I ended up, with nearly all windows runing as admin, except the browser.

I also stumpled upon different problems. I could solve them together with our friend Google, but I think I needed two hours to get my very simple CRUD application working.

My conclusion up to now: Grails has to be easier to start with.