Grails is really an extension of Groovy, which started out as a fork of Beanshell but with more Java-like syntax. It's business purpose was solely to take some

Grails is really an extension of Groovy, which started out as a fork of Beanshell but with more Java-like syntax. It's business purpose was solely to take some market-share away from Rails. The marketing name "Groovy on Grails" even sounds like "Ruby on Rails". The Grails software itself was begun as a thin wrapper around other software products from various companies (e.g. Spring from SpringSource, Hibernate from JBoss) so its backers could use it to muscle in on the training and consultancy markets for those products. They then started a company, G2One Inc, and quickly shopped it around among those companies, successfully fooling SpringSource into buying it after 12 mths.