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Opinion on Grails, the Rails like Web-Framework for the JVM?

2 points by krautjakob ↗ HN
What is the general opinion on Grails (http://grails.org/) ? Haven't seen a thread about it in years, even though the framework seems well made and stable over the years. Thanks for some feedback!

4 comments

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lkrubner
Nowadays you can use jRuby on the JVM, so I'm guessing the folks who really want Rails on the JVM are likely to go with jRuby, not Groovy.

I also have the impression that Groovy/Grails was a bit late to the party. The era of the monolithic framework was awhile ago. We could argue about when it was exactly - its tough to say for sure when a fashion peaked. The mindset was clearly present when Struts was released in 2000 and Rails was released in 2004. At some point later (we could argue about when), there was a shift toward lighter frameworks. Rails was lighter than Struts, and Rails was eventually followed by very lightweight frameworks such as Sinatra. The same trends played out in every language. Python had Django, which some regarded as heavy, and then later it had Flask, which was more lightweight. Wicket promised "No XML" for the Java crowd, and Spark promised Sinatra-like simplicity. And then there emerged languages like Clojure that, for the most part, avoid frameworks and instead facilitate high levels of composition, making it easy to pull together whatever libraries are needed for a given project.

I hope I am being clear. There was a trend toward lighter weight frameworks, and Grails showed up relatively late, promising something that was somewhat heavy. The first release was in 2006, and by 2008 there was the Merb rebellion against Rails, which I think reveals how much people's preferences had changed between 2004 and 2008.

I have the impression that Grails is a great piece of software, but when it showed up it didn't add much that was new to the party, and the party was itself moving on to new styles. So it never quite caught on.

krautjakob
Thanks for your feedback and judgement. It's somehow coherent to what I thought evaluating it. While everything appears to be nice and well thought I kept asking myself: Will learning all that stuff (as well as Spring & other Java bloat) be really worth it? And if it is: Who develops in Grails anyway, will I find developers for my neat little Web 2.0 Apps?

So I will have a closer look at Sinatra / Spark which really seem a great approach to develop small-medium web apps. Previously I had my doubts about their capabilities (it appears too simple), but seeing the traction those technologies have might convince me otherwise.

lanna
I'd stay away from it. It is an inconsistent, incoherent mess. The framework feels like a mesh of hacks.
vorg
Grails is really an extension of Groovy, which started out as a fork of Beanshell but with more Java-like syntax. It's business purpose was solely to take some market-share away from Rails. The marketing name "Groovy on Grails" even sounds like "Ruby on Rails". The Grails software itself was begun as a thin wrapper around other software products from various companies (e.g. Spring from SpringSource, Hibernate from JBoss) so its backers could use it to muscle in on the training and consultancy markets for those products. They then started a company, G2One Inc, and quickly shopped it around among those companies, successfully fooling SpringSource into buying it after 12 mths.