Pitfalls of Grails? Comparison to Struts 2?

Question

I am looking for any comparative analysis of the Grails vs Struts 2. If any of you gurus have run into issues using Grails. Please do let me know if you have worked on large scale projects that use Grails. Peter Keller had mentioned in my previous post here that Sky News is using Grails. I was wondering if anyone else is using it. It would be great if I could get a first hand experience outlook of that framework.

Answer 1

I'm programming grails for about half a year now. I think it's a great framework. Unfortunately I haven't much experience with Grails on large scale projects yet. The current issue of GroovyMag has an article of Grails in a J2EE world.

If your current project benefits from using Grails depends on your background. I'm a Java Developer and always programmed web applications with Struts, JSF, and so forth. Using Grails with Groovy was a big change for me because of the "Groovy"-way. So the first time your performance will be much slower compared to Java frameworks you know well. After you programmed Groovy and Grails for a short time you will get a great speedup (and it's fun ;-)). You can think of it a little bit like Maven's convention Over configuration.

A good book for starting Grails is "The Definitive Guide to Grails - Second Edition"

For more Grails projects you could take a look at the success stories on grails.org

Answer 2

I've used both Struts 1 and Grails in medium-sized projects. Grails is a breath of fresh air in terms of speed of development.

The only real pitfall is that it's based on Groovy and not on Java, and this has its disadvantages:

• less powerful IDE support;
• some errors caught by Java at compile-time appear only at runtime in Groovy - this is by design and not a fault of Groovy.

Answer 3

This is not really a fair comparison as Grails is a superset and years beyond Struts. The only reason I can think to use Struts at this point would be to accommodate a team that already knew it and refused (or was unable) to learn new things. Even if you pick struts, you'll then need to pick some other components just to get a fully functional framework. FYI you can use struts as the view component for grails http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GRAILS/Struts+1+Plugin

Biggest pitfalls of grails are #1 unfamiliarity, #2 change (framework dev is VERY active), #3 compile-time type checking (you better write unit tests and have GOOD coverage).

Answer 4

Grails is great. And replying to Robert Munteanu, Grails has perfect IDE support through Netbeans Groovy+Grails plugin and Intellij IDEA 8 has support for Groovy and grails.