Since version 2.3 Grails has excellent support for creating REST APIs. This new support comes with some new console commands. Besides the well known generate-controller command, Grails now comes with a new command which let you generate restful controllers for a given domain class. In the following example, we will create a restful controller using the new generate-restful-controller command. First we create a domain object

$ grails create-domain-class grails.data.Movie

Second we will generate the REST controller using the new command:

$ grails generate-restful-controller grails.data.Movie

This command will generate a restful controller with the name MovieController with a default REST implementation. Notable is that this generated controller does not extend RestfulController<T> but gives you a full implementation of the REST functionality inside the actions. Below you can see for example the default implementation of the index method of the generated restful controller.

   def index(Integer max) {
       params.max = Math.min(max ?: 10, 100)
       respond Movie.list(params), [status: OK]
   }

Furthermore this command will generate the REST responseType settings so both JSON and XML formats are supported.

static responseFormats = ['json', 'xml']

Code written in Grails 2.4.1