posted by pledbrook on July 20, 2010 06:43 AM

Grails is a rapid application development framework for web applications on the Java platform. It's similar in many respects to Ruby on Rails, but it's based on Java libraries, like Spring and Hibernate, and the Groovy language. It also produces standard WAR files that can be deployed to a servlet container like Tomcat. That means you can deploy Grails applications to a Tomcat cluster and in this article I'll show you how.

Getting started

In order to demonstrate clustering, we need an application to deploy. Assuming that Grails is installed (I was using Grails 1.3.3 - the latest) we can create a brand new application with the command

grails create-app my-cluster-app

This will create a my-cluster-app directory containing the project. If we then switch to that directory, we can generate a WAR file straight away by running

grails war

Of course, the application doesn't do anything yet. Nor is it ready for clustering.

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