Building and testing web applications - Making Java Groovy - page 371

10.4. Grails: the Groovy “killer app”
It's hard to overstate the impact on the Java world made by the Ruby on Rails (RoR) comet
that streaked across the Java sky back in 2005. Java web development at the time consisted
of a series of layers composed of a wide mix of technologies, each with its own configura-
tion files and dependencies. Just starting a new web application was a challenge.
Ruby on Rails, with its strong emphasis on the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle and
Convention over Configuration, demonstrated how much simpler life could be. While a lot
of Java web developers embraced the RoR approach, not everyone was in a position to
simply abandon the Java world. The big question was, how do we bring the rapid develop-
ment principles from the RoR world into Java enterprise development?
I'll address that in a moment, but first I want to discuss every web application ever cre-
ated, [ 9 ] from the 30,000-foot level. Figure 10.5 shows the standard architecture.
9 True for most non-web applications as well. These layers are pretty universal.