Grails is a full stack framework and attempts to solve as many pieces of the web development puzzle through the core technology and it's associated plug-ins. Included out the box are things like:
* An easy to use Object Relational Mapping (ORM) layer built on Hibernate
* An expressive view technology called Groovy Server Pages (GSP)
* A controller layer built on Spring MVC
* A command line scripting environment built on the Groovy-powered Gant
* An embedded Jetty container which is configured for on the fly reloading
* Dependency injection with the inbuilt Spring container
* Support for internationalization (i18n) built on Spring's core MessageSource concept
* A transactional service layer built on Spring's transaction abstraction