Is Grails (now) worth it? [closed]

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.

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.

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

It's highly worth it!

We are using Grails in several projects, all of them with great success for the following reasons:

• Easy - It's one of the easiest frameworks we ever used

• Legacy code reuse - All we have to do is get our legacy code and throw it on the lib or src folder and it's done. Just great for us.

• Legacy database structure - It's an awesome tool if you wanna generate data visualizations on legacy databases.

Now, about viability:

• Bugs: we haven't faced too many bugs since version 1.1 (version 1.0 was WAY too buggy for us)

• Tools: Netbeans is really improving on this front, but it's not even close other tools like Intellij IDEA (great support!). The same can be said about Eclipse.

• Portability: we never faced a single problem on our projects.

We have half a dozen Grails applications in production now, and while Grails is different from java frameworks and requires some learning time, it has paid off because we have used Agile techniques. Details:

• We use IntelliJ. It's not very expensive and is has paid back in a few weeks for us.
• Automated testing, Continuous Integration and refactoring are a must, as for for all dynamic language code. If you already practice TDD or at least have a decent test code coverage, then it doesn't add any extra work.
• Hibernate comes by default with Grails, but you can use other persistence frameworks. There are 5 persistence plugins other available today
• Logging was clearly not a concern in Graeme Rochers' mind, but it has steadily improved. I haven't faced an issue where an error was not logged, though (you have to make sure you catch exceptions correctly in your code)
• Debugging was clearly not on the radar (but this has not improved). We don't rely on debugging anyway.

This said, as with all new technologies, I recommend making prototypes, code reviews, pair programming, and maybe use some consulting as well.

It is very much worth it. I've been using it for over a year now and love it. I used to shy away from these types of rad tools, but it has changed the way I work. With the 1.2 release it has gotten even better with better stack trace info (particularly for GSPs).

The only problem I have had with scaling has been hibernate and it's cache, which really isn't a grails issue. Even those I don't like hibernate in general, the way grails wraps it with GORM is a work of art to me. The criteria closure aspect is wonderful to work with.