Grails Reviews & Product Details

Easy and fast development

Open Source

Big form and huge supportive resources

Compatible with the latest Spring and Java

Easy to deploy in production

Easy multitenant integration

Easy-to-use web pages (GSP) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Less community than others

Heavyweight as there are a lot of wrappers Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My favorite map component, Json, params. Mapping works are more fun than anything else. Cron Job is one of my favorite jobs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Disli didn't get anything to do. The deeper I going, the more I fall in love. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Grails was designed to give the power of Ruby on Rails programming style to Java developers. This model means extremely fast prototyping of web user interfaces based on domain model. It was not possible to achieve it in pure Java though, therefore Grails is based on Groovy, which added lots of cool features at the time: dynamic invocations, closures, more functional programming style. While staying on JVM, Groovy can still benefit from all the Java libraries already available on the market. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The competitive advantages of Grails seem to fade over time. Ruby on Rails is not that popular anymore, since dynamic web applications are rather executing their logic browser side (react), than server side. Also features of Groovy, like closures, are effectively replaced by lambdas in Java 8, syntactic sugar of Doman Specific Languages in Kotin, and evolution of spring framework components like spring-boot. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

language similarity with java and platform structure Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

additional dependencies that come along with grails Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One of the best scripting languages that I have ever used for automation purposes in my real time projects. It is more flexible, more object oriented, aligned with Java Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

No there is nothing that I dislike on groovy on Grails. It has given me immense pleasure using it in real time projects Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The easiest to learn framework. Base on Groovy, it's an easy to grasp framework if you have some Java experience. Additionally, its convention over configuration logic, let you create applications on the fly Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Grails does a lot of magic in the background for you, but sometimes you that's the reason for unexpected errors Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Every thing is configurable and each component is in perfect isolation with other. If implemented properly - this is the best framework. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Other ORM support and application monitoring tool which will ensure best practice is implemented Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

0. Can use any existing Java library. 1. Advantages of Groovy (over Java): (0) Metaprogramming (1) More efficient operators (Elvis operator, Safe navigation operator, etc.) (2) More useful methods for JDK classes (such as Collection#find()), more (3) Can use many DSLs (can do the same things with less code) 2. GORM is better than using MyBatis/Hibernate in Java app development. 3. Easy to convert between map, list, and JSON, XML. 4. GSP is better than JSP—but I prefer not to use either at all. Instead, Grails apps should respond with JSON data only. HTML pages can be developed by another app (using Sass, AngularJS, GulpJS, etc.), using AJAX or JSONP to access JSON data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

0. Most Grails plugins are not good enough, less active, lack documentation, obsolete. e.g.: (1) I prefer to use RestTemplate, UriComponentsBuilder provided by Spring Framework—which is simple enough, solid, can be used in both Java and Groovy, rather than Grails REST Plugin (2) I don't think using the Spring Security plugin is better than using the Spring Security framework directly in resources.groovy—Because, besides learning the Spring Security framework, I had to learn the plugin too (for debugging problems). Maybe, it should focus on Spring Security's extension, not the configuration? 1. Easy to start, hard to deep in. Grails wraps many well-known Java libraries, frameworks—such as Spring Framework, Spring Security, etc. Without much knowledge about Spring Security, I don't think a Java/Grails beginner can configure the plugin well. Only those familiar with JVM, the libraries Grails used, can play around with Grails. 2. Grails 2's build mechanism (Gant, but Grails 3 is using Gradle) 3. Grails 2's plugin mechanism (Still studying Grails 3) PS: I also questioned what about using Spring Boot + Groovy + GORM (without Grails)—since most Grails modules have announced they can be used outside Grails. I'm more familiar with Spring Framework. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I've used Grails for various projects. From full web oriented architectures, to RESTful APIs, even for console applications. Its Convention over Configuration nature makes it extremely quickly to get started with any project and just modify what you need from the initial sensible defaults. Personally, coming from JEE, where you have to edit thousands of XMLs and properties files, it was awesome.

Groovy is a very powerful and comfortable language. If you come from Java, you'll find yourself loving it right away. Before choosing Grails, I considered Ruby on Rails, but didn't like having to learn a completely new and wheel-reinventing language. Grails has everything RoR and many other frameworks has, using a familiar language and industry proven backing technologies. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As the community is not as big as others, the documentation is sometimes a bit scarce. Many times I had to fix things by myself, even checking Grails source code and making pull requests to the core team. The plugin ecosystem has the same problem, there are not so many plugins as other frameworks have.

I, however, see those disadvantages as some kind of challenge. I love contributing to the community and here there is plenty of room for collaboration. Sometimes having too much is also bad, like Node.js, where you have a hundred ways of doing anything and none of those ways are completely correct. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Groovy: It is easy to process web data with groovy since its allow dynamic typing. Strong typing is good for making control structure more reliable. Gorm makes it very easy to manipulate and fetch data from database and its intuitive to use. Running environments (test,prod,dev, custom) makes it very easy to apply different behaviour for the system when its on test, production or development or in continuous integration. Plugin system and dependency management is very powerful way to control the dependencies of your project. Java-nature: Environment is the same in all the servers no matter if you deploy in windows or linux (different distros). Java-nature: Application is alive even if there is no page load, like in php. Threading makes it easy to manage background tasks without cronjob. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Testing literally sucks in my grails 1.3.9. I have tried upgrading it a few times but it is a lot of work. IntelliJ runs the tests smoothly inside the IDE but free IDEs like NetBeans just display the Grails console output and I have to read the reports to see what actually failed and why. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.