Is Ruby on Rails pushing the right buttons in the Java World?
Posted by Ben Rometsch on 27 May 2006
It seems that there is a certain amount of groundswell around Grails, a framework that really does seem to straddle the line between Java and Ruby. Built on top of the Java-based scripting language, Groovy, Grails helps itself to a number of excellent concepts born out of the Ruby on Rails project. Convention over configuration, simplicity, a refreshing lack of XML configuration all coupled with the power and expressiveness of a dynamic language in Groovy.
I've been playing with Groovy for a few hours and it does look very interesting indeed. There are a number of really, really important factors that make it stand out.
It lives inside the JVM. This means that it is completely portable. If a client of ours is running Windows Server, Solaris or even OSX we can deploy to it. We also get all the performance and security of the current JVM's available.
It is built on top of Hibernate and Spring. This is a huge bonus. Although I appreciate the simplicity and clean design of ActiveRecord, Hibernate goes far deeper, is much easier to tune and can deal far more easily with legacy databases. As for Spring, well, Spring just plain rocks.
You can write things in a dynamic language. I haven't used Groovy much, but I can immediately appreciate how concise and elegant the language is. Not having to endlessly restart app servers is when writing code a joy! More work needs to be done on the debugging aspect, but I am sure these sorts of tools will come in time.
It perfectly integrates with Java. This is, in my opinion, the most important aspect of the framework. Need to generate some PDF documents? No problem; the API's are there. Need to connect to SSH somewhere and do some work on a remote server? Again, not a problem. Over a decade of high quality, well documented and proven-in-anger libraries are there if and when you need them.
Grails is only at version 0.1, but it already shows a lot of promise. It has already attracted the attention of Oracle, certainly a major coup, and hopefully will attract more and more Java developers to the project.
I'm really hoping to have a small greenfield development project land in the new-business lap of the company so that we can give it a run and see how it works out. I'm fairly certain it would save us time, and consequently our clients some money!