8 Responses to “Grails, First Impressions”

1. 

   Dave Meurer said on Thursday, December 18, 2008, 17:13

   Hi Altuure,
   I share your thoughts on GRAILS. There is definitely a group of people who like to code in groovy, but there are those who want to stay in Java, particularly for the cons you listed above.

   With that said, I’d really be interested in your thoughts on Skyway Builder, which is GRAILS like, but generates Java instead of groovy. It’s an open source Spring app generator that contains scaffolding capabilities – and Springsource certified the generated code – BUT, it’s always great to feedback from users like you who share these thoughts in your blog. Here’s a link to an interesting quick start video that shows the scaffolding stuff – http://www.skywayperspectives.org/videos/builderhowto/index.html – any thoughts are appreciated!!
2. 

   altuure said on Thursday, December 18, 2008, 23:10

   Hi Dave,

   Before I start , maybe you may want to look at my older post about code generation
   http://www.altuure.com/2008/02/27/code-generators-wizards/

   Anyway, I will try your tool with pleasure and post a review hopefully after Christmas

   Best wishes
   Mert Can Akkan
3. 

   Graeme Rocher said on Tuesday, December 23, 2008, 11:38

   To address your cons in turn

   1) Yes knowledge is always required, you need to know how your ORM tool is operating on. Having said that many users have built Grails applications without knowing Spring so its not as clear cut as you make out

   2) Frameworks can never solve every problem, however I’m not sure I understand your statement that a “groovy api” is needed. Groovy is Java, and every Java API is a Groovy API. There is no need for special layers to call Java from Groovy. Additionally, whatever framework you use whether it be raw Spring, Seam, Grails whatever, you will have to implement some logic that is your own. A framework won’t do everything for you.

   3) The performance of Grails at a framework level is about 70% of raw Spring MVC. Groovy itself is obviously slower than Java. Having said that the performance != scalability. And you can scale Grails like any other Java web framework

   4) Fact: The less lines of code you have the more maintainable your code base is. Fact 2: The better tooling you have the more maintenable your code base is. Groovy is typically 60% less verbose than Java. And because it has optional typing you can get all of the refactoring and code analysis benefits of Java tools

   5) The “simple world”? What is this? Java developers love making their lives more complicated that necessary

   6) You can add custom validators, custom validation constraints etc. You can create custom functionality with plugins. We have over 80 different plugins at plugins.grails.org. How extensible do you need to be?

   7) The documentation is at http://grails.org/doc/1.0.x/ and is pretty comprehensive. If you find something that is not covered please mention it in the mailing list and we can work to fill that hole. There are also a number of books available on Grails: http://grails.org/Books

   Having addressed all of those concerned, I will also say that yes Grails is not for everyone and is not the solution to every problem and ultimately it is up to you to evaluate it and come to your own conclusions.
4. 

   altuure said on Tuesday, December 23, 2008, 11:43

   Thanks Graeme ,
   In fact your blog is one of the best reference to grails
   I am still playing with grails, and having fun with it

   Kind Regards
5. 

   bob said on Thursday, January 1, 2009, 10:12

   I thought Rails was dead.
6. 

   Jo said on Thursday, January 1, 2009, 11:39

   Altuure, thanks for this post and your evaluation.
   Sadly the web is full of technical reviews where the people scratch the surface and then start praising. I’m always glad to see a post with cons ! It’s up to me to check their relevance then, (Same for the ‘Pros’) but I have at least an impression. The counterattack from prominent side was a nice roundup. IMHO Grails looks quite different depending on the angle one looks at it.
   When one is a competent Java Developer with Enterprise background Grails can be a way to more productivity in coding and maintanance. But it’s not, the ‘everything will be easy solution’. I will never understand why the ‘grails-marketing’ emphasizes that point so much. Being a while in IT, I know that the special cases proof a tool / framework not the CRUD examples. That’s not limited to any language or technique. Once you dig deeper you have to learn the underlying technologie.
   It’s importatn to mention that, like you did !
   Another issue that always makes me wonder: How can Spring and Hibernate can be called lightweight. These are comprehensive technologies where you find out something new nearly every day. A framework on top of that has to be a complex solution, too. None of these is IMHO an alternative for a small projekt. (I’m not talking about an evaluation here ) They do back best if one sticks with them for a while and gathers a solid understanding – besides all ‘marketing efforts’ to claim something else.
7. 

   altuure said on Friday, January 2, 2009, 0:22

   Hi Jo,
   first of all thanks for adding your HO its good to hear responses specially like those
   I also agree hate this CRUD mania like you, but we should admit that, this should be easy, but the solution is neither code generators nor ’scaffold’ utilities,

   for the simple project , its not a real world project but a simple feature test evaluation project to hopefully have fun
8. 

   Markus Jais said on Friday, January 2, 2009, 9:45

   I agree with Graeme on the Grails documentation. It’s pretty good and comprehensive. In fact I think most open source projects have a worse documentation than grails.
   That said, I think all Grails developers should get the 2nd edition of Graeme’s book. The first edition was very good and so I expect the 2nd edition to be the same.