FYI - I started going through Practical Grails 3 book by @erichelgeson and noticed that adding "apply plugin: "org.grails.plugins.views-json"" in build.gradle file as suggested resulted in build failure with message "Plugin with id 'org.grails.plugins.views-json' not found." I resolved it by just removing the apply plugin entry, I hope this helps anyone running into the same issue