Looking At Grails (And Liking It)

fred@fredjean.net (Frederic Jean) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 04:57:58 +0000

A few months ago, I was introduced to the Grails project while attending a Boulder JUG meeting. It was just after they released they 0.1 release. It was a little rough around the edges. At the times, I thought it was just another Java based Ruby on Rails wannabe. As a result, I just ran the basic install, went through the quick start tutorial and moved on to more interesting (to me) projects.

I have since changed my mind.

We use a lot of Groovy at OpenLogic. We use it in our infrastructure. We use it to build our content packages. I tend to use it whenever I would have to write more catch clauses than they are lines of code that could possibly throw these exceptions. It’s a great dynamic language in its own right, and it integrates seamlessly with Java code.

Now, Grails happens to be written in Groovy. It does borrow concepts from Ruby on Rails such as Convention over Configurations, (dynamic) code generation and scaffolding while leveraging the power of existing libraries and framework such as Spring, Hibernate and Sitemesh. I’m just starting with it, and I’m still learning the different “grailisms” used to code the applications, but I like it so far.

I’ll keep looking at it and evaluate it for future project. In the mean time, I’m starting with a pet project. It is similar to a different project I did while I was still at Sun. As a result, I already have a pretty good idea how to proceed with the project. That will help a lot.

Out of my mind...: Category Grails

Looking At Grails (And Liking It)