Is Grails worth it? [closed]
We had a team of 12 people all seasoned senior Java devs who learnt Grails from 0.6B and we are all still working on projects based on Grails. I wouldn't go back to Java willingly, and we are all relieved to have broken the back of how to get somewhere quick with a Grails app.
It was a struggle, it was not easy and there was/is frustration.
Nevertheless we delivered something very quickly given our ongoing efforts.. There are bugs, many which have workarounds.
I have heard of several instances of developers who are good at Java trying to dive into deep, complex incantations of Grails projects. We eschewed all Java and went pure-Grails and Groovy. We made sure we started simple, built up the complexity as manageably and as practically as possible.. We dared not dive in the deepest end and hope that our Java knowledge was enough to carry us.
We had eventually created something huge and complex that worked fabulously and did so far faster than writing pure Java/Spring/Hibernate version; and thats without decent IDE support and a far worse situation in terms of bugs than today.
As regards Eclipse support, the only real IDE to use for Grails/Groovy is Intellij - the Eclipse support is way behind, sadly: I was an Eclipse lover and am far from being an Intellij convert - the Grails/Groovy support blow everything else away though.
Yes, Grails is immature compared to Spring perhaps. Or Hibernate. And I would wager that in the first 1.5 years of their existence they were equally as fraught with issue.
That being as it is, places the onus on you, to take care that you keep complexity to the absolute minimum, to carefully test-first (in our opinion) and build up to complexity gradually and with care.
There is no fast code solution with Java once you involve Spring/Hibernate in the stack. The complexity Grails embodies is a reflection of Spring's / Hibernate's own complexity. If you feel that you time is better spent doing it with pure Java, I wouldn't argue otherwise.. I still have my WTFs but now that the steep learning curve is behind me I think I will stick w Grails some more.
I very much enjoy writing grails application for two reasons:
- I don't have to use Java
- I can use Java
I think after having become familiar with grails one gets his things done very quickly and elegantly.
So much for the plus side. The minus side is performance, which hits me on two aspects: deployment and testdriven development.
I haven't managed to run more than 3 grails applications on a single (rented) server, because I quickly hit the memory and performance limits. There are simply too much frameworks included.
Plus, the testrunner of grails isn't worth that name. When I run unit tests, they should be done in an instant, not in 10 to 20s. So I find myself all the time writing business logic in plain java, because I can test it much faster. But I guess that this can be addressed with a better integration into the IDE (eclipse).
I think Spring's support of Grails is going to be a big boost. If anybody can move it past CRUD on the web, it's those guys.
I also think it's reaching a critical mass. There are several new books that will be hitting the market in 2009. I think those will help the adoption rate.
I fully agree with the original posters sentiments.
We are a Java + Spring shop and took the opportunity to try out Grails. We first created a very small test application which turned out to be pretty simple to do and it worked pretty well. The main issues we had here were due to our lack of knowledge with Groovy and Grails.
Following this success (confidence boost) we decided we would attempt a slightly larger project. This has been a much more painful experience. As mentioned by others, we have uncovered all sorts of bugs and issues which were not immediately apparent on the surface. The app restart cycles get extremely painful and unless you have really good test coverage its a nightmare to do any sort of re-factoring.
Really frustrating is having code fail without a single error message! It just does not work and you don't know why?
I like the ease of use of plugins for JMS, Quartz and Remoting to name a few. Does away with a lot of tedious XML.
I almost like GORM for its simplicity though we have had several issues as well.
I don't like the loosely typed nature of Groovy and the fact that you have to run your application just to be able to catch a bunch of errors, reminds me too much of PHP or Rails.
At the end of the day we are asking ourselves if its possible to write a complex piece of manageable software using Grails...
We have a Grails application about to go into production....so we will see.