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Mastering the Grails Powerful Tiny Web Framework

Posted by kdawson on from the coffee-on-the-train dept.

Someone from IBM tips this article on their Developerworks site about Grails, a modern Web development framework that mixes familiar Java technologies like Spring and Hibernate. "Grails gives you the development experience of Ruby on Rails while being firmly grounded in proven Java technologies. This article show you how to build your first Grails application with the lessons learned from Rails and the sensibilities of modern Java development."

2 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Rails set a milestone, what will be next? by filbranden · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It seems that Rails set a milestone for development frameworks, and nowadays everything new has to be based or inspired or copied from Rails. Seems that Rails really made a breaktrough there, in fact, it seems to be responsable for most of Ruby's popularity. Rails has been translated several times to other languages, like Python (Django, also TurboGears to a lesser extent) and Java (Groovy to a lesser extent, now Grails that it's a ripoff even on the name).

    This makes me think that sometime ago the buzzword of the moment was J2EE, and everything everyone made had to be J2EE compliant. Even C# and .NET was a big Microsoft ripoff of Java and J2EE to fight against the big migration of programmers to Java.

    Which leads me to the fact that soon the buzz around Rails will be over, as much as nobody creates a new J2EE-based framework, now everything is taken for granted. So, what will be the next milestone? The next technology that will have people talking? Have everyone trying to clone its own?

    1. Re:Rails set a milestone, what will be next? by Shados · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Who knows. The thing with Rails though, is that it brought a bunch of technologies that were big standards in the enterprise world, and packaged it as one...

      Its not much more than an MVC framework, an OR Mapper, and a 4th Gen tool wrapped as one... But in many circles, like in the PHP world, or in the more hobbyist groups of the other platforms, these things were not known. Basically, the people that browsed internet forums weren't used to it, and Rails brought it to them ine one buzzword compliant package... Its still not very special...

      So now, you have a bunch of frameworks in Python, PHP, .NET, or Java, that were really just derivative of the J2EE-based world, package themselves, tweak one or two "conventions", and change their name to BlahRail... but the tool is really the same as it used to be. Its just more buzzworld compliant now.

      So I guess Rails did set a milestone. A "buzzy" one. My current employer trips in his feet all over Rails (we're a .NET shop), and every few days shows me yet another "OMG!" feature of Rail...that actually was already implemented in our main product long before that buzzword came out... Oh, aside ActiveRecord::Migration. That we actually added after Rail. Thank god it brought to light that hugely complex and powerful feature! (That took exactly 6 hours to reimplement)