I've put up the latest installment in my "Grails for PHP developers". Rather than delve too much more in to Grails head on, I'm taking this installment (and at least the next one) to delve more in to the Groovy language itself. Groovy offers similarities to PHP, but also many differences which can trip you up if you're not careful. I'll try to lay those out as best I can in the next couple of installments.

This new part of the series goes back and puts the spotlight on GRoovy, the base of the Groovy/Grails combo. He talks about working with variables and arrays as containers for multiple pieces of data and some possible gotchas that could come up along the way.

They assume you know a little something about the graphics functionality in PHP before you've started because they dive right into the code for the CAPTCHA image. They explain what the code's doing, but if you're not familiar with the PHP GD functions, you might be a little lost. Their string for the image is a randomly generated md5 hash.

The bar graph example is similar and they include a bit more for it - pulling information from a database (MySQL) backend (the results from a poll). They provide all of the code for this example and finish the tutorial off with a brief look at the options for using these types of dynamic images on the other pages in your site.