How spring 3 compared to Grails - not in complicated terms, I am asking as a beginner

[vaibhav mishra]

I am learning grails and I know it uses Spring under the hood, I have your spring 2 in action book but by the time I got it here, the book was obsolete(I am in India) and also as a first java web framework I find it hard to follow, grails works like a charm as a matter of fact and everything is so learner friendly , I am huge fan of in action series but kind of think that you should make book more novice friendly , I was flat reading first few chapters and weird explanation of IOC principle, being a beginner at that time , the complexity was a dealbreaker and that book is still in my shelf dust settled in, don't get me wrong I am a huge fan of 'in action' series but as a hobbyist learner the previous version was not for me, hope you address in this issue.

[Paul Wallace]

Hi

As you say Grails is built on top of Spring, and a few other technologies (Hibernate, SiteMesh, Apache Commons etc). Spring is a fully featured Java Enterprise stack, and with great power and flexibility comes greater complexity. Grails is an "opinionated framework" where a lot of the complexity is hidden from you in the default configurations provided by Grails (off course you can override these conventions and get at the full Spring stack of you want).
In a similar way, GORM hides the complexity of Hibernate.
I would agree that such books are not trivial reading, but it would be difficult for the Spring in Action book to address the capabilities of Spring without getting into advanced concepts. I find that sometimes you need to write some code to try out the concepts before such books make sense.
Perhaps Grails is the gateway to understanding the concepts before delving into the depths of Spring.

Regards

Paul

[David Newton]

+1: programming is an inherently complex process. There is no way to trivialize advanced concepts. Giving up, however, isn't the way to move forward--consistent effort over time is. Give it another shot.

[Dave Klein]

Perhaps Grails is the gateway to understanding the concepts before delving into the depths of Spring.

My introduction to Spring was Grails and I think it was a wonderful gateway and on-ramp. You can start out using Spring without knowing that you're using it and then as you have the need / desire you can dig in deeper and deeper. As you do dig in, Grails still provides ways to make it easier like the Spring Bean Builder DSL and support for the newer Spring annotations.

Though, I must admit that I'm a bit biased, I highly recommend Grails as a way to learn Spring. I also recommend keeping a copy of Spring in Action with you as you work with Grails. It will help you to see what Grails is doing under the hood.

Dave