I have worked with Grails lately and i have to say it seems like it may be the technology i was looking for! I am a skeptic by nature but I am getting more and more excited about Grails. It is really a cool and deeply thought out framework for all web development needs.

Why is Grails better than Rails?

Some might say that jruby will let you do the same thing and keep it old school (ruby not groovy). To be honest, i don't like Ruby as a language that much. I have read some articles/books (just a few) and i have read some code as well. I must say it seems to me more like perl than Java. Maybe its just matter of personal taste but ruby seems little bit messy to me.

Groovy (in witch Grails is build) is a powerful dynamic language natively running in JVM. What it means is that you can use Java code in Groovy and you expose Grails artifacts to Java code. Integration is transparent in both directions! this means your new sites can perfectly integrate with whatever legacy Java code you have. It can consume Spring beans, Java libraries, web services you name it.

Why Grails and Groovy are cool at all?

Because they prophet quick death to old, over engineered, technologies like JSF and EJB. You get all goodness of Java world with cutting edge flexibility! You also get a language that is designed to fit into the web and framework that is designed purely for web.

Web sites have to be agile and respond quickly to market needs. Bubble is gone and no one wants to pay millions for a product that will be obsolete on the day of the release.

Nowadays only banks can afford to waste money on inefficient and overpaid consultants spending days on setting up simplest features. If you are a bank you will make a profit no matter what, especially if you are an Irish bank hehe (Banks in here are so uncompetitive that they earn on everything double the margin they should have). But if you are a reasonable business you want value for money, Grails gives you great value for no money.

To win on the web you have to stay on top. You have to work in small teams, minimize the bureaucracy and adopt never-ending changes. Embracing the change is the motto of agile community and it is a right way to go! Its far better to develop simple code that is easy to change (because environment is flexible), than create over-engineered monsters that should fit every possible purpose.

There is more! Hibernate

Grails comes with hibernate support and quite reasonable code generators. It builds structure for you and makes easy to follow patterns. It will let you access databases, create tables and persist objects like you never dreamed of ; )

No seriously, i think it works quite well.

Future is in agile languages

If you are planning for the future consider learning Scala, Groovy, Grails maybe C#. If you work close to web definitely learn javascript but Java will not get you far anymore.

Think flexible, think how to get solution working, think how to write reasonable amounts of code. If you can do all of that and still have project that is clean, scalable and maintainable .... then you are gold.

Tests, Security, Queues, Web Services, REST, Ajax, SEO – it is all there !

Grails is a really remarkable framework. Reading a few books about it and working with it should show you how well was it designed. It is THE TOOL for web developers. It covers all the fronts you can imagine.

If there is functionality you may need in THE WEB, Grails probably solves it better than you would think. If not then there is a plugin to do it.

Grails - the final words

The search may actually be over.