I just went to the Cleveland Java Users Group and Chris Judd  gave a presentation on Groovy and Grails. It was a very good presentation. I can see why people are excited about Groovy. So I got home tonight and, much to my wife's dismay, I set a goal to download and create a simple order entry application for sausage orders in 1 hour. I was wrong. It took me 30 minutes to download Groovy and Grails, setup my home environments, create the application, create a single domain object (Orders), create a controller, add properties to the domain object, and modify the controller to automatically build the CRUD objects. Here are my steps:

1. Go to the Groovy site and download the latest distribution.
2. Extract the archive to your filesystem.
3. Add the Groovy bin directory to your PATH environment variable ($HOME/groovy-1.6.0/bin).
4. Go to the Grails site and download the latest distribution.
5. Extract the archive to your filesystem.
6. Set the GRAILS_HOME environment variable to the installation directory for you Grails extract (i.e. $HOME/grails-1.1).
7. Add the Grails bin directory to your PATH environment variable ($HOME/grails-1.1/bin).
8. Make sure that your JAVA_HOME environment variable is set.
9. Create a workspace directory on your filesystem ($HOME/workspace).
10. Change directory to the workspace directory.
11. Create the project (grails create-app sausage-orders).
12. Change directory to the project directory.
13. Create the domain object (grails create-domain-class orders).
14. Edit the domain object (grails-app/domain/Orders.groovy) and add the following variables inside of the class:
    

        Date dateCreated
        Date orderDate
        int quantity
        String units
        String flavor
        String name
        String phone
        String email

15. Add the following code inside of the constraints block:

      units(inList:["lbs", "3-lbs"])
      flavor(inList:["regular", "hot"])

16. Create the controller (grails create-controller orders).
17. Edit the controller (grails-app/controllers/OrdersController.groovy) and change index = {} to scaffold = true.
18. Run the application (grails run-app).

That's it! Go to http://localhost:8080/sausage-orders. It's a simple application, but it works and it's a little more interesting than a hello world app.