Grails: A Quick Start Guide - Question

Hopefully the book will cover concepts such as what Grails is best for, or what it is not so well suited for? For example, desktop applications, web, scripting, data processing, large scale...?

GQuick does discuss what Grails is best for, which (in my somewhat biased opinion) is web applications, large and small, that target the Java Virtual Machine. Grails produces a Java .war file which can be deployed to any standard Java web container (Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss, Glassfish, WebLogic, etc.)

I don't cover using Grails for desktop development, however you could conceivably use Grails to build the server-side component of a distributed application that included a desktop component. As an example, at the recent SpringOne 2GX conference in New Orleans, Jeff Brown built a desktop application in Griffon (the Groovy Swing MVC framework) that accessed a Grails application via a webservice.

Dave