Is Grails (now) worth it?
I know this is a duplicate, however, the Grails world has moved on considerably since that question was asked more than a year ago, as has the IDE support in Eclipse, so please don't just blindly close it.
I thought the answer was yes and have embarked on a new project with Grails 1.2.0 and have flirted with the Groovy/Grails bits of the STS Eclipse Integration.
I think the question deserves revisiting after a year of Grails evolution, when the answer was definitely mixed.
So, as an experienced Java web developer I have these questions and would appreciate my assumptions being challenged:
- Is Grails now worth it vs. Ruby or roll your own?
- Has it overcome its buggy start?
- Does it really confer rapid development benefits? (I admit I am struggling now I am past the extensive baseline configuration to make my bespoke app which is not list and page oriented)
- Does it perform for real world production apps? (It feels heavy)
- Is the Eclipse plug-in better than it was and fit for purpose? (I think not yet)
Thanks
EDIT: I am learning as I go and I have a couple of significant gripes to make about living with the framework - rather than framework capabilities themselves. I am adding these because I think they should be considerations and are based on my experience and opinion, and may help someone who is trying to decide whether to go grails. I may also be showing my lack of experience with the framework, so none of this is meant as out and out criticisms. I am an experienced developer and this is what I have found:
Debugging is really hard. In fact it is almost impossible, especially as a beginner in the framework, which is when you need your trusty debugger friend the most. I have spent way more time than I ought to tracking down problems of syntactical errors in some part of the code to do with referring to domain fields which cause silent failures somewhere in the stack.
Logging is frankly awful. You have two modes, "nothing useful" and "an inordinate amount of useless stuff". My debug log was 128Mb after a single page request and contains nothing about my error. The whole issue of logging needs reconsideration in the framework in my opinion.
The STS Eclipse IDE is of marginal value. Other than syntax hilighting it is not much use. You can't debug the code so it is a glorified editor. The code hints are patchy and there is no GSP support at all as far as I can see. It also is the slowest Eclipse plug-in I have on my desktop - by about 2 minutes to start up. It is shockingly slow. I have reverted to a text editor (which you'll notice all the online tutorial videos do too) and some custom syntax hilighting.
I have some serious concerns about performance. A bit too early to say, but I am already finding myself tweaking the database because of hibernate. Perhaps that's to be expected, but I am really having to keep my domain model simple for the conventions to yield performant queries.
And one last one, the convention that your logical domain model and your physical database model should be identical is not a smart default and unlikely ever to be the case in the real world. I know you can separate the two, but it creates a degree of complexity which I think could be avoided if the conventions were extended. There is inadequate documentation about composition and what you need to do to make it work in practice.
Answer
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.