Working in groovy is great, so much less code! Grails has come a long way since I was a committer on it several years ago. The MVC structure is very easy to understand and the wide range of plugins make its quick to get projects going.

The best part of Grails is GORM. GORM uses easy to learn and readable DSL to for interaction with Data Bases. Writing queries in GORM DSL and implementing relations from ER diagram is as simple as 1 2 3. Certainly GORM is not the only thing I like most. There are many more such as URL mappings, convention over configuration, extensive plugins, grails services and out of the box support for implementing RESTFul web-services. Although we did not use view layer (jsp/gsp) of grails for our web application, we use it extensively for internal applications used to manage our business process. Grails is so easy to use that we ended up creating few internal applications to manage our business process in Grails. Apart from Framework, people behind its development are cooperative and its overall community is quite friendly. At many occasions, my reported issues were fixed within a day or two. Grails release cycle is quite fast, so you don't have to wait for the fixed issues to arrive in next stable release.

It includes all the proven technologies like Spring, Hibernate, Sitemesh etc. It's built Groovy doing things differently is so easy. It gives so many things out of the box for which we tend to create our own solution. The project structure makes it's easy to understand where to put things. Best thing is it's GORM, Geb and Spock testing. Data binding, validations, inbuilt tags and creating own tags makes the life much easier that we tend to do in conventional way. The recent upgrade built on Springboot which makes it much light weight as well. The dynamic scaffoldin feature makes it much easier to do POC and MVP to showcase to clients. Plugin base architecture helps to create smaller services and reusability of code. It has a great community which serves to plugins e.g; integrating spring security is like 2 hours task which makes your development efforts really less. It has a in built capability of serving JSON response so creating rest application is like just adding annotation.