What can I learn from Grails?

Question

If I know Rails, what new ideas/patterns would I learn if I looked at Grails? I have no intention to move to Grails and no need for a Java stack, but if there are neat ideas I could learn from Grails I'd like to learn them.

Answer 1

Grails has taken totally different direction. It is very hard to compare Grails and Rails.

Grails is not framework. It is stack of frameworks. You can find all the features you find in plain Spring, Hibernate, Quartz, Compass, Sitemesh frameworks. So at the end you get all the best from all these frameworks with convention-over-configuration.

However, I really want to mention about very interesting idea introduced in Grails about modulizing the application into plugins. Plugin in Grails is minimized independent project. Separating application logics into plugins allows to share your code to community and keep application in separate modules which results in easier testing and easier development.

Answer 2

Grails has at least two patterns I'm aware of that I believe do not exist in Rails:

1. Command objects (and auto binding request params to them)
2. Conversation based request handling using web flows