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
A new install of Grails 2.3.4 on Fedora 18 had the same issue from me. The solution in my case (thanks to the comment from Halil) was to upgrade to JDK 1.7.0_45.