“Bitterballen” event and Grails
I visited a small seminar on wednesday 8 october. One of the subject was Grails. Since I have not worked with Grails before (only with Rails) I was curious to find out what it could and could not do.
At the moment of writing the latest version of Grails is 1.0.3 and according to the presentor it is production ready. The presentation began with the usual CRUD application example. As in Rails this was quickly generated through some commands on the commandline and within 1 minute a running CRUD application was presented. Next he demonstrated a scraping of a website and storing this in the database. This information was then used to generate a RSS feed of this scraped information. The final demonstration was not show, but should have been a demonstration of Google(TM) Maps integration.
All these examples were done with minimal coding (no more than half a page) and minimal effort.
As I viewed this presentation I came to some conclusions about Grails. One of my conclusions is that this technology is very suitable for the quick development of CRUD based backend applications. There you will get the most out of this technology. Another conclusion I had was that with some more effort you can setup nice front end applications with this. But there will be alot of customization needed, what decreases the benefits you have over other frameworks. Another conclusion I had was that although this technology is java based, the syntax is very different and not easy to maintain. Refactoring is very difficult and required you to use Intellij to get some basic support. This vendor lock is in my opinion not desired. Also this is yet another layer on my stack which is not absolutely nessesary to get the job done. Extra layers and extra technologies introduce a potential to extra bugs and performance loss.
My final thought: A nice technology, usable for quick backend development but needs to mature a bit in several area’s and integrate more with existing tooling.
Regards.
wowww.nl
resources: Grails
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Hi Marc,
I’m glad you liked my presentation. I personally however, don’t think that the lack of IDE support in Eclipse is vendor lock in. You can do it by hand, you can use IntelliJ, or you wait untill the Eclipse plugin is a bit more mature. If you compare it to Ruby on Rails (see this page: http://weblog.infoworld.com/tcdaily/archives/2008/07/ruby_on_rails_i_1.html), you’ll see that one of the main arguments for the IntelliJ plugin for Rails is the refactoring support, and that the other IDE’s are bit less on the refactoring. This IMO is a big advantage over other IDE’s and helps you while refactoring, but it would go a bit far to also call this vendor lock in.
And, on a side note: you’ll have less code, so maybe less to refactor?
9 oktober 2008 om 05:25Erik,
Thank you for your comments. I will check out the blog on Rails.
I do not know if less code means less refactoring. It might also mean more difficult to refactor. But I do not have that much Xperience with Groovy to have any sort of substantial opinion.
13 november 2008 om 02:00