I was using grails in version 2.2.0 on Ubuntu for some time and everything went good. My application ran fine. I updated my JDK to 1.7.0_25
This is due to a change in 1.7.0_25 which causes a problem when using spring-loaded. It's fixed in Grails 2.2.3, so upgrading to that will fix this. See http://jira.grails.org/browse/GRAILS-10183