The Great Grails Switch
The Apple Switch Ad campaign was very successful for Apple, so much so that there seems to be a sort of switch meme campaign amongst Grails folks to try to get Ruby on Rails developers to switch to Grails. Originally this blog post presented 10 reasons to switch from Rails to Grails and now Graeme Rocher of G2One has added another ten. Here is the complete list of reasons to switch to Grails… or at least top reasons to give Grails a try…
- GORM with hibernate/spring and jpa is much better than ActiveRecord
- No distribution problems; runs in many production ready containers
- Internationalization out of the box (not specifically ignored as DHH does)
- Transactions actually work, and they include save-points.
- Not only dynamic finders and counters, but dynamic listOrderBy
- No green threads (although this may be fixed in Ruby 2.0, around 2010?)
- Ability to use pessimistic locking out of the box
- Real-live prepared statements and .withCriteria method
- Production level test reporting with built in Mocking and Stubbing
- Search operations are based on Lucene (with a plugin)
- A view technology that doesn’t suck
- Mixed source development made easy with the Groovy joint compiler (no falling back to C to solve those performance problems ;-)
- Built in support for rich conversations with Web Flow
- A rich plug-in system that integrates Grails with technologies Java people care about like GWT, DWR, JMS etc.
- A buzzing and growing community with a larger traffic mailing list as opposed to a stagnating one
- Built on Spring, the ultimate Enterprise Application Integration technology
- A Service layer with automatic transaction demarcation and support for scopes
- More books coming and being adopted by enterprise organizations near you
For the true die hard Ruby on Rails developers this might not be reason enough to switch to Grails, but for those Java developers on that are on the fence Grails might seem a bit more attractive now.
For those interested in getting started with Grails, take a look at my Groovy and Grails tutorials.
Technorati Tags: apple, switch campaign, groovy, grails, rails, webdev, development
These are not reasons:
- GORM with hibernate/spring and jpa is much better than ActiveRecord
- A view technology that doesn’t suck
Can somebody point to an article, book, whatever that explains _why_ GORM is better than ActiveRecord, or Grails’ view technology doesn’t suck but Rails’ does?
@Paul - You are right in that some of the reasons are subjective, such as the view. I mean, I have used just about every view technologies and I never found myself caring too much about them.