Investing in Grails?

Question

Today someone told me I should give Grails a try. So we can still use our old java code for some things, but develop much faster.

This isn't really a debate on what programming language is better, although if you have tips I'm all ears, but really my question is:

Is Grails just an overhyped fashionable thing to use, or is it here to stay? I don't want to end up a couple of years from now with my site being developed in a technology no one uses anymore, no updates to the software, and no community to help ...

Answer 1

I think any programming language or library risks obsolescence at some point in time. Eventually there will be a new hotness to replace it and one after that too. Will it be updated for the newest JVM? That is a better question. I think the answer to that is, yes. More than that, if you keep the client unaware of how the server is operated you'll do just fine.

Answer 2

Well here is a list of companies that are making the bet on grails. The big name I see is Pepsi/tropicana. Some of the other companies might just not be known to me, though.

Answer 3

Grails is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Grails takes the concepts of web frameworks like Rails and applied them to existing Java technologies. It also leverages the Groovy language which is a superset of Java with all of the dynamic syntactic sugar to make a next generation web framework possible.

Grails combines JPA (Hibernate), Spring MVC, Sitemesh and builds on concepts like JSP (in GSP) . It takes the Convention over configuration approach made popular by Rails and Dijango. Is it over hyped? Maybe. It is not a silver bullet but it takes Java web application development to the next level. Is it here to stay? Yes. Groovy and Grails are growing strong.

Answer 4

Sabre, which is a private holding company than owns Travelocity, lastminute.com, Zuji and a few other European travel sites is doing all their development for the foreseeable future in Grails. They've invested a lot of time and money in building an internal platform whose foundation is Grails.

Grails scales just fine. If there is a part of Grails that is giving you trouble, the whole thing is open source and very modular, so almost anything can be replaced. There are a lot of large companies that are betting quite a bit on Grails.

Remember the core Grails development team is employed by Spring Source, which is now owned by VMWare. They all are working to support Grails and believe it is the best JVM platform.

Answer 5

The fact that Spring has bought the company behind Groovy and Grails makes me quite comfortable that the project is here to stay for a while.

As we're living in 2010 we can also ask Google this question (what can't Google do?). Search trends for Grails: http://www.google.com/trends?q=grails&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

The graph shows that Grails has grown at a steady pace over the last four years, although it appears to have stagnated in 2009. Speculation: It might have something to do with the financial crisis and fewer software development projects?