Is Grails (now) worth it? [closed]

Answer 1

I'm a full time java developer but use rails for my hobby projects. We evaluated grails for a project at work a year back. My experience with grails left me feeling a bit disappointed and this was the reason that I began to investigate rails. Having used both my impression is that even though groovy is not far behind ruby as a language, rails provides a significantly improved experience over grails. Quite simply, rails seems to solve far more real world problems, particularly when you factor in the number of good gems that are available. I'm thinking of things like, providing search, versioning, rss, non crud apps, integration with cloud services, etc. I get the impression that grails is around about the level of rails 1.x. By the end of this month rails 3 should have been released. We've actually decided to now move towards using rails at work. In the end, grails is easier to pick up for java developers, but ultimately lacks the refinement to cover a wider range of project requirements.

Answer 2

Started a Rails project recently, had been doing some stuff with Grails.

My main thing with Rails is that there's a lot of stuff that is completely opaque to the dev (which i hate), and this tends to increase when you start to add more plugins/generators/libs/etc, because in order to combine them you will need to patch something up. You get the feel that rails+plugins are just a giant DSL hack that starts breaking if you use some wrong combination of plugins+versions.

With Grails, although the ecosystem is far smaller, everything tends to be relatively consistent. The DSL approach is not very used, and by using conventional-but-boring design (I mean using classes,interfaces,etc. instead of DSLs) it's far easier to understand how the plumbing works.

Doing a 1-to-1 comparison, here's how it goes:

• Language Implementation: I prefer Ruby over Groovy, although I don't know Ruby that well. Groovy feels like a good-intention-bad-implementation language, where some of the features are welded on top of the syntax. I'm referring to some special classes that seems to be there only to allow some hack.
• Framework Features: Rails is far ahead on this one. You can configure most aspects of Rails (ex: layouts, templating, css/js packers, validation, testing frameworks, etc) in several ways. Grails is lagging on this, although its flexible enough for most use cases.
• Plugins: Rails has a ton of plugins which can be seen as a blessing or a nightmare. Some plugins are not maintained, others do not play well with some feature or plugin and there's alot of forks. I'm learning to stick with the basic and most used plugins (authlogic, haml, etc) Grails has excellent plugins for the basics (authorization/authentication, ORM, etc) and some other plugins for smaller stuff
• Testing: Rails has a ton of ways for testing, but this is not necessarily good. Some testing frameworks do not play well with some plugins, etc. Grails has less testing plugins but again they tend to integrate better with some of the main plugins (because there aren't that many plugins to integrate)
• Database: Grails wins by far.
  • I prefere modelling my domain classes instead of hacking my db.
  • Hibernate (which is used under the hood) is years away from its Rails counterpart. Although there's datamapper for Rails (which is more similar in nature to Hibernate than ActiveRecord), I feel it's not mature enough. Grails also have migrations throug a plugin.
  • You have great cache impls for Hibernate (JBoss cache, EhCache, etc) which can boost your performance through the roof
• Libraries: I feel that Ruby has alot of libraries for new stuff like NoSQL or Cloud services, while Java has a gazillion of libraries for older stuff like Excel processing. Don't forget that Java libraries are usually much faster than Ruby
• Cutting edge: Rails is more hype, which translates to having more resources behind it. This means that if you'r trying to integrate MongoDB or Riak with Rails, there's a good change that someone has already made it. Grails is lagging, mainly because it is not so popular so the community tends to focus on solving day-to-day problems instead of using all the bleeding edge stuff like NoSQL,etc

Here's an example:

• Most grails plugins generate code in the form of models and/or services. The rest is usually handled by a library. You can inspect the model/service code, see what it does and change it.
• Most Rails plugins usually hook up with the Rails API, which means that you end up calling some function or including some module, and then use the plugin's own DSL. This works great when it works, but when it breaks it's horrible and you end up having to patch some stuff, or install a different plugin or plugin version. I'm guessing a more seasoned Rails dev is more comfortable with this but I'm not.

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Conclusion:

• If you want bleeding edge, don't mind some occasional patching, favor a large community and/or don't mind using ActiveRecord-style DB, go with Rails. Besides, Ruby as a language is very elegant
• If you favor class-interface designs instead of DSLs, prefer modelling your app through models, don't need exquisite features and are familiar with Java ecosystem, go with Grails

Answer 3

Regarding the eclipse plugin, is still coming its way, but you can use the eclipse version from Spring Source (SpringSource Tool Suite)

http://www.springsource.com/products/sts

It's quite decent compared to the previous plugin versions, and since Spring Source has acquired the company responsible for grails and groovy, you can expect that STS will become better quickly

Answer 4

Personally, I learnt RoR and used it for a few home projects, but then switched to Grails, mostly because it runs on the JVM and therefore I am hoping to make use of the plethora of Java performance/profiling programs, which should help identify any bottlenecks in code before they become a problem.

In general I haven't found too much difference in the quality of IDE's used by RoR vs Grails. Although, to be fair, I'm programming on Linux and haven't tried TextMate for RoR development. When I was using RoR I used Netbeans.

Right now I am programming using STS and am finding it a pleasure to use with Grails, although I still find that method detection/completion could be made to work much better.

Answer 5

I have been using Grails more than 4 months now and I will try to give you my personal feeling about Grails and its usability.

Is Grails now worth it vs Ruby or other roll your own?

Of course, the answer is not 'Yes' or 'No' but it depends. It depends on your requirements (do you need to be in the Java World?), on your preferences as well (do you prefer the domain-oriented development, do you prefer Groovy...)? However, I can answer that Grails is a serious alternative to Rails. I believe that whatever is your Rails application, you can do it with Grails as well. But depending on the nature of your project, it might take more or less time. Again, if you are familiar with Rails but not with Grails, Rails is the safer option.

Has it overcome its buggy start?

Yes. If you take a look at my initial messages (in this website or others), I was complaining a lot about Grails bugs. But, you just need to remember that Grails is a little rough on the edge (not too much use of domain inheritance ,for instance) and once you are familiar with the framework, you don't experience too much bad surprises. I am not saying that Grails is not buggy. It is certainly more than Rails. But also, it is more usable than buggy. A piece of advice for that : use as few plugins as possible. Because many of them are buggy and some are not compatible among themselves. So, do not include grails plugin unless you are sure that the grails plugin is up-to-date, non-intrusive and tested (by yourself).

Does it really confer rapid development benefits?

Yes. You almost do not need to deal with DB design. Configuration is almost done for you from the beginning thanks to Convention over Configuration. Your application is easily maintenable. The only drawback I see is front-end development that is not as rich as other technologies (like Rails or ASP)

Does it perform for real world production apps?

I cannot say because I still didn't go my website live but I am pretty confident since sky.com is using Grails and the sites attract significant traffic - around 7 million page views per day . Again performance depends a lot on your application architecture and design decisions.

Is the Eclipse plug-in better than it was and fit for purpose?

No idea. I am using IntelliJ but I guess it is not much better than one year ago according to complaining messages I see on the Grails realm.

I hope it helps.

Answer 6

In my experience, Grails bring a few very attractive features on the table which definitely makes worth learning and using it.

• Agility - things we used to take weeks to implement in conventional J2EE projects are generally a day's work with grails plugin system. Things like ajax, jquery ui, acegi, restful implementation, scheduler system and lots of them
• Runs on JVM which alleviates need to learn some other run time system and its idiosyncracies

• Java like syntax and groovy syntax sugar. like best of both the worlds. You can immediately start with Java instead of learning syntax of new language like Ruby and then slowly you can move to groovy syntax which is robust, easy and intuitive

  For the project managers, unless there is compelling reason for "not to use" grails for some reason( resistance from higher up, to adopt new technology or something), I don't see any reason why grails can't be used or at least tried.

To answer the concern about debugging, it's not that hard. Debugging is easy if you use Netbeans IDE. That brings me to one more point to mention. After few experiments with all the IDEs we found that Netbeans is the most suited to do the job. It has better support for code completion, syntax highlighting and debugging etc. In my opinion, STS is not good enough for that.