Bought in to work on an in house framework that was to be fair quite outdated, needed to find something that would fit the same space as the technology it was r

Bought in to work on an in house framework that was to be fair quite outdated, needed to find something that would fit the same space as the technology it was replacing (Basically Java + J2EE) but at the same time wanted something that was friendly to rapid app dev + agile, had used Django extensively before but obviously not a possibility here. Looked around in the J2EE space and found grails which was; A) Modelled after ruby on rails conceptually B) Constructed from a large amount of best of breed components in the respective sphere which addresses that piece of the framework, like Spring and Hibernate. C) Had a language which didn't make me want to tear my hair out. I'd actually never used groovy, which is the language that the grails framework uses internally, before, but found it to be easy to adjust to having a fairly good grip on the general digital polyglot, and having the ability to mix and match with java code has been very eye opening just because of the sheer volume of ready made solutions to the vast majority of problems out there. To be honest the thing I hate the most about grails is stack traces, they're ridiculously verbose, huge, multipage sprawling monsters, and there's really not much to complain about aside from that. If I could start my project over again and the need to have it work in the J2EE space was not there, I'd be very hard pressed to say if I'd choose grails or django, both are spectacular at what they do, with their own unique advantages and disadvantages. I didn't choose it because I wanted to learn it, I was already very familiar with the paradigm and it was obviously the right path forward in terms of getting some rapid app dev processes in place for this organisation, mostly I just wanted to show people what was possible, rather than building apps with string concatenation and manual sql with selects by row and index ( I shit you not ) while staring at AJAX and the general web app environment with increasing confusion.