Rails or Grails?

Ratn Deo--Dev picture Ratn Deo--Dev · Sep 17, 2008 · Viewed 17.4k times · Source

Grails vs Rails. Which has better support? And which one is a better choice to develop medium size apps with? Most importantly which one has more plug-ins?

Answer

Rollo Tomazzi picture Rollo Tomazzi · Sep 18, 2008

One other thing worth mentioning: the design philosophy of both framework is somewhat different when it comes to the model. Grails is more "domain-oriented" while Rails is more "database-oriented".
In Rails, you essentially start by defining your tables (with field names and their specifics). Then ActiveRecord will map them to Ruby classes or models.
In Grails, it's the reverse: you start by defining your models (Groovy classes) and when you hit run, GORM (Grails ActiveRecord equivalent) will create the related database and tables (or update them). Which may also be why you don't have the concept of 'migrations' in Grails (although I think it will come in some future release).
I don't know if one is better than the other. I guess it depends on your context.

This being said, I'm still myself wondering which one to choose. As Tom was saying, if you're dependent on Java you can still go for JRuby - so Java reuse shouldn't be your sole criterion.