The Definitive Guide to GrailsPaperback, 14 January 2009

In the late '90s I was working on a project developing large-scale enterprise learning mana- ment systems using early J2EE technologies such as EJB 1.0 and the Servlet framework. The Java hype machine was in full swing, and references to "EJB that, and Java this" were on the cover of every major IT publication. Even though what we were doing--and learning as we did it--felt so horribly wrong, the industry kept telling us we were doing the right thing. EJB was going to solve all our problems, and servlets (even without a view technology at the time) were the right thing to use. My, how times have changed. Nowadays, Java and J2EE are long-forgotten buzzwords, and the hype machine is throwing other complex acronyms at us such as SOA and ESB. In my experience, developers are on a c- tinued mission to write less code. The monolithic J2EE specifications, like those adopted by the development community in the early days, didn't help. If a framework or a specification is overly complex and requires you to write reams of repetitive code, it should be an immediate big red flag. Why did we have to write so much repetitive boilerplate code? Surely there was a better way.