Rapid Web Development With Grails
In this session I got to see a little bit more under the covers of Grails. Grails is built on Spring IoC, MVC, and WebFlow. It also makes use of Hibernate and SiteMesh. I am currently working on a Rails project and have some background with that framework and with experience fresh in my mind I have to say that I am impressed by Grails Server Pages aka GSP. The Grails template mechanism, the heart of GSP, supports dynamic tag libraries. as far as I know tag libraries are missing from the latest release of Rails. My Rails rthml files have a bunch of scriptlet code that is getting on my nerves and their is no way around the <%= @foobar %> scriptlet. In my humble opinion, Grails template is far better than Rails. Some of those in attendance did note some objections to how you define your model in Grails. In Rails your model extends ActiveRecord and consists of just two lines of code. In Gails your model doesn’t extend any given class but needs to define properties for the table columns. This differences are rooted in philosophy rather than technology. As a hacking project for anyone that is interested, it should be easy to hack a Grails version of the ActiveRecord if you feel that is what you need.
According to the speaker, Grails is not just for ‘Greenfield’ applications. The speaker was willing to put money to quell questions regarding performance because the Groovy code that makes up Grails is a small part of the application. The Grails platform is backed by the performance of Hibernate, Spring IoC, etc. that make up a large part of the framework. Your Groovy code is just a facade.