I am about to create a brand new website. I plan on using Groovy for my JVM language (just an arbitrary constraint I imposed on myself as part of the polyglot experience) and would like to give my users the niceties of AJAX on the front end. Everything else: DB, ORM, Web framework, etc. are wide open.

I am not new to development in general nor web development in particular. I have development experience in all the layers typically used in a web application (from browser to DB). I am looking for technologies that will allow me to create and maintain a straight-forward web application while minimizing the "gotchas" that naturally occur when gluing each layer together.

For web framework I've narrowed my candidates down to Grails and Tapestry and am leaning toward Tapestry. But it's hard for me to ignore the Groovy synergy in Grails.

Does anyone have recommendations (especially - but not exclusively - if you've used Groovy with Tapestry) on which field I should plant my seeds in?

Thank You! Sean