I've been wondering, how does Grails compare with other JVM web frameworks in 2015? I like the rapid development/convention over configuration approach, but I'm cautious about dynamic typing, and for some reason the syntax puts me off (lack of punctuation makes everything blend together?).
The dynamic typing is optional. E.g. at the startup I work for, the convention is to use static types for function signatures, and dynamic types within functions.
In general though Groovy/Grails is actually surprisingly good. Groovy is much easier to learn that Scala, more powerful than Python, and most Grails conventions are fairly straightforward and easy to understand. Both Groovy and Grails are a little bit under documented, which is frustrating, but not so bad as to be a deal breaker. That said for my personal projects I use Python/Django, only because the community is much stronger. And although I do miss Groovy's closures, the strength of the libraries and ecosystem, as well as the fact that it's easier to hire developers, more than make up for whatever syntactical advantages that Groovy has.
>In general though Groovy/Grails is actually surprisingly good.
I'll second that. Groovy is amazing but under appreciated on places like hacker news. Interesting that you bring up python because I find groovy very pythonic in some ways. Even more so with the new type hinting stuff python is introducing.
Although for lighter weight web stuff I've been watching the http://ratpack.io/ project.
> I'll second that. Groovy is amazing but under appreciated on places like hacker news
Did you know that VMWare pulled its funding for their 6 developers working on Groovy and Grails last March? Two of them got jobs as Grails consultants for Object Computing, two of them (one former Groovy tech and one former Grails) got jobs at Gradleware working on Gradle, one (the former Groovy P.M.) an unrelated job in France, and I don't know about the other one. There might not be much more work or maintenance done on either Groovy or Grails from now on.
>Did you know that VMWare pulled its funding for their 6 developers working on Groovy and Grails last March?
Because they shifted their focus to CloudFoundry only. This does not mean that Groovy or Grails are going to die.
>There might not be much more work or maintenance done on either Groovy or Grails from now on.
Yes. I am closely following grails development and you are true in this regards. There was no doubt a disturbance in community and even we were concerned about its future when we were in initial stages of our project. Right now, we are confident that this duo won't die anytime soon.
>Two of them got jobs as Grails consultants for Object Computing,
Good for Grails future as OCI has been providing grails based services in the past and is committed to grails future.
>two of them (one former Groovy tech and one former Grails) got jobs at Gradleware working on Gradle
Gradle being Groovy based is being used in Grails as well. Again it is good for the duo.
>one (the former Groovy P.M.) an unrelated job in France
> Because they shifted their focus to CloudFoundry only
Although VMWare/Pivotal said they were pulling their funding for Groovy and Grails in order to shift their focus to CloudFoundry only, that doesn't explain why they held onto Spring. Groovy/Grails and Spring were managed and promoted together, and the more likely reason is the Spring team didn't want Groovy/Grails attached and petitioned the VMWare managers to dump them. Perhaps the Groovy and/or Grails people were trying to take over in some way. Grails 3.0 released in March now bundles Gradle as well as Groovy and Spring from before, perhaps another predatory move. It could explain why Gradleware recently employed two of the retrenched Groovy/Grails developers from VMWare, to help in protecting their product against takeover by bundling.
I am not a rails developer but I have seen that rails developer have alot of inertia and they won't switch to grails. Grails is only attracting Java developers who are fed up of exhaustive configurations. Unfortunately books written for grails also assume that you are switching from one of java to grails.
I've been using Grails exclusively since version 0.42. That is a few years ago now, and I can tell you that it has been a few great years :-)
One of the most impressive things is that there hardly have been any breaking changes since 0.42 to 2.5.0. Sure a lot of new things has been added, but most of the code I wrote around that time is still working.
I have created several small projects and a few really big. People get really impressed with how much I can get done in a very short time thanks to a lot of the Grails "magic". And of course access to several great Java libraries helps.
I really like Grails approach to the MVC design pattern, it's not so difficult to move away from it either and create something that solves a problem in a better way. Some projects I have made doesn't use GORM/Hibernate, but straight JDBC/Groovy SQL. And some of my projects mix GORM/Hibernate and Groovy SQL. I get the best of everything.
The Grails documentation is great, and the mailing list has always been an interesting place to get new ideas to solve some specific problems. There is plenty of activity on stack overflow.
Grails is an awesome and mature web development framework. It's sexy, agile and still has the wow factor even after several years.
> there hardly have been any breaking changes since 0.42 to 2.5.0
The recently released Grails 3.0 is breaking. How many Java programmers out there maintaining Grails websites will bother upgrading their codebases and configuration files? How many downloads and installs have there even been of Grails 3.0 ??? With its creator skipping the Grails conference next week, one wonders if he's jumping ship, dumping the Grails downside risk onto others while keeping his fingers in its upside pie, and moving on to his next revenue thing.
