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...but it's interesting to see Stu Halloway's thoughts on design patterns. I heard that he once gave a talk where he said something to the effect of "The 'Design Patterns' book should have been named 'Ways to Work Around C++ Language Limitations'".

99% of the framework is Java

Really? If I understand it correctly, Grails is based on Groovy language - controllers and models are in Groovy, views are GSP, which means Groovy Server Pages. Groovy is 5x slower than Ruby and you still claim that framework written in Groovy will be faster than framework written in Ruby? That somehow doesn't make sense to me.

I suggest you read a detailed comparison of the two frameworks:

It's mainly comparison of Active Record and Hibernate and it doesn't prove anything about the whole performance of Rails vs. Grails.

I would also suggest you attempt to run single transactions involving, say, 100,000 records in Rails and see what happens (something I do routinely).

Why would I do that? I'm not sure if Rails is the right tool for crunching 100,000 records in a single transaction, moreover routinely. It's intended for small to middle-sized web applications running usually short transactions and I would like to see a comparison of Rails vs. Grails on exactly that field. Making a show of Hibernate, Spring and tunability of Java means nothing to me.
BTW someone made a comparison of _pure_ Spring/Hibernate application vs. the same app rewritten in Rails and the results are not in favor of the Java stack (and I'm not going to compare the lines of code or time of implementation of both solutions, that's another story):
http://blogs.relevancellc.com/articles/2005/04/04/ some-numbers-at-last

We can argue against the methodology used there, but it shows, unlike you, at least some numbers.

I will probably have to do a comparison of Rails and Grails by myself, because your claims (Grails faster than Rails) are backed only on assumptions (Hibernate, Spring, Java thing etc.) and not on facts (real world benchmarks).

If you are in the market for some Ajax knowledge, you should check out Relevance LLC's reviews of Ajax books. A couple of smart guys. They have reviewed 7 books so far.

Why not check out Ruby On Rails?

Websites
RubyOnRails - http://www.rubyonrails.org/

Ruby general
http://www.ruby-lang.org/

Programming Ruby book - 1st edition online.
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/

Ruby Code and Style Online Mag
http://www.artima.com/rubycs/index.html

Small article on how to program in ruby.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-ruby1.html

RubyOnRails vs Java for web development efforts
http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=92#comments

Another comparing Java and Ruby for Web Efforts
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rail s/24863

So why don't you want to put your name (your anonymous slashdot handle at that) to this? Because it's an easy, cheap shot playing to the peanut gallery.

Wow, a bunch of li's on a page. That's never been done before.

Interesting that you think this site, just as an example, is 'just a bunch of li tags'.

http://www.yakimaherald.com/

It's been advertised enough. It doesn't need a cult-like following -- "use Ruby on Rails and you get to be one of the cool kids."

People who talk about cults and zealots tend to enjoy battling straw men - why not discuss real implementations, and real points, instead of declaring victory over imaginary enemies? No one said anything remotely like the statement above, aside from yourself of course.

Having used Ruby on Rails, I can tell you that it's really not worth the hype. It brings nothing new to the table, it doesn't really improve development times at all (if you, you know, actually try to implement something full-featured), and it's 50-100x+ slower than a comparable PHP or Java Servlet implementation.

As compared to PHP, it brings a few interesting ideas to the table, including MVC, auto-generated methods and the ORM layer. If you wish to compare bits of Rails to bits of lots of other frameworks, of course you can find something of it in a lot of different places. As to your '50-100' times slower than 'x', I'm afraid that's just nonsense. For most of these frameworks if you have caching set up right you won't be hitting the database very often, and the speed has been shown to be comparable. Either can be faster than the other depending on how you program/cache. Here's a java guy having a look at rails (I think there was a slashdot story about it a while ago). Sounds fair to me.

http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=31

As to improving development times, it probably depends on the programmer. It doesn't have a 'write my app for me' button, but does provide useful helpers and abstractions, a lot of conventions which will help you not make a mess of your code, plus you get to program in Ruby, which is a fun language. Now perhaps you found it too restrictive, or limited in certain ways, if so, perhaps you'd like to post something more constructive and debate the weaknesses of the framework (no officially blessed internationalisation, authentication or sub-applications).

Not necessarily slower.