I just looked for some books on amazon.de and was a bit surprised. The english versions of the books were cheaper than the german ones. "The Starfish and the Spider" for example was tagged with 16,96€, "Der Seestern und die Spinne" costs 24,90€, the same ist true for "Groovy in Action". Sure, english books (at least paperbacks) are often printed on paper of lower quality and have to be translated into german, but I remember the time when english books in Germany where more expensive than its german counterparts. So, we have a win-win situation, improving our english and saving money.

My name is Michael Fritsch and this blog is a try to share my first experience with Groovy and Grails with everyone interested in.

Being a Technical Editor in a Software Company, I do some programming using Java, JSP, XSLT for our publication platform but I'm not a hardcore developer as Frerk is. Nevertheless, he introduced me to this new language and framework and I made my first steps.

Trying out the simple Grails example, I was impressed by the ease of development. Enter some create-domain-class commands and the like, add some properties to the class and you get a running web application. I started with the GINA-Book to learn something about Groovy and heard about functional programming and currying for the first time (yes, I know XSLT is something like a functional language. Ah, and by the way I just heard a talk on XSLT and XPath 2.0 and they seem to have great improvements compared to 1.0). I had no idea what currying was, but a colleague of mine said "Whow, currying", so it must be something good ;-)

I'm curious to learn more about Groovy and Grails and I hope I will have interesting findings to write about in this blog.