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I'm interested in anyone's thoughts on Grails as compared to RoR. Which one is easier to pick up, develop in, has better tooling, etc.?

• thom_nic 12y ago
  In my experience, go with RoR unless you're already in a deeply-committed Java shop. Rails has much more momentum & community support (even if Node is slowly chipping away at it.) With Grails by comparison you're more likely to find plugins that haven't been updated in years and be constantly fighting dependency conflicts. At least that was my experience. If you go the Grails route it's also inevitable that you'll need to learn all of the various "layers" underneath Grails nice veneer. E.g. Grails wraps a lot of existing Java technologies which are fairly complex on their own like JEE, JPA, etc. Rails seems to be "shallower" and easier to grok by comparison. As an aside, I personally love the Groovy language and syntax too, and how easy it is to interop with any java libraries. Don't get me wrong, if I needed to write a Java-based, user-facing web app, Grails is the first option I would look at. But short of the Java requirement I would choose RoR or even Sails.js (not as mature but rapidly improving it seems.)
  • vampirechicken 12y ago
    You can take advantage of the JVM (JIT compilation, etc) by deploying under JRuby, the Ruby runtime implemented in Java.
  • nitishmd 12y ago
    What are your thoughts on Play framework in comparison to Grails?