Now I am covering the details of developing and running the application

1. Go to command prompt and your grails home directory.
2. Create the application.

• The create-app command creates the full project, with a template with placeholders for the different components of your application such as configuration, MVC, library, and much more.
• > grails create-app   (it will ask for a application name say – first_app)
• Will create basic  view layout as main.gsp page

3. Add the Business Logic and Model( Domain Classes)

• The domain class is the core of the business application; it contains the state and behavior of your application.
• > cd first_app
• > grails create-domain-class  (enter name say – first;you need to use the same name for the class and the table you want to map your object on.)
• The domain class is located in the following location:./first_app/grails-app/domain/First.groovy

class First{ // A blank class will be created on create-domain
/*can add vars you don’t need to worry about creating the getters and setters*/
String name
Date birthdate
}

4. Create the different screens from the domain class.

• > grails generate-all (For creating all screens-enter domain class name – first)
• This command creates the different Views and Controllers; you can take a look to the directories: ./grails-app/controllers &. /grails-app/views

class FirstController {//will create <domainname>Controller
// with some default closures
def list = {…}
…
}
FirstController also gets lots of new and useful dynamic methods whose names are handily self-explanatory:

• save() saves the data to the table in the HSQLDB database.
• delete() deletes the data from the table.
• list() returns a list.
• get() returns a single record
• create()
• update().

Also generates the 4 view gsp pages to render the output on screen.

5.      Run the Application

Grails provides a way to run the application in standalone mode (run-app). This command starts a Web container (based on Jetty) with the application deployed.

> grails run-app  and go to http://localhost:8080/first_app/ to see it running.

Before creating the first grails application we need to first  install & set up grails environment –

1. Go to http://www.grails.org/Download , Download and unzip grails.
2. Create a GRAILS_HOME environment variable.
3. Add $GRAILS_HOME/bin to the PATH.

Pre-requisite -  Jdk 1.4 or above.

Cool thing about Grails is you don’t need to install server or database for running test apps. web server is ‘jetty’ server comes with grails so you do not need to install separately. But if you want to use any other server like tomcat , jboss   ..,you can.

Grails also comes with HSQLDB, a pure-Java database. Using another database, such as mysql or Oracle Database is just changing the dbdriver in DataSource.groovy ,thanks to Hibernate and GORM.

Enjoy setting your machine for start Grailing.

Update:  In this post, how to create and run First Applications . I am covering the next steps for starting development