

Ask HN: Groovy/Grails or Scala/Play? - flylib

if I had to pick one to go with and learn, what would be my best option?
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acesubido
I'd say it depends on what you wish to accomplish.

Based on experience, you can deploy 'something' out there and build that
'something' really fast with Grails. GORM instantly takes care of persisting
to DB with minimal effort, there's not much to configure. If you're planning
to just create an API Server, the latest Grails 2.3.x releases have
specifically made that easier too.

Can't say anything for Play since I haven't used that, but if you face growth
problems with your Grails project (scaling), just piece off the heavy parts
and create separate services written in Scala. First hand experience, Finagle
is a good choice for this. You can easily be productive and quickly create
services with this RPC system.

Conclusion: In my opinion, your best option for creating an MVP/Prototype is
Grails.

~~~
GFischer
I haven't tried Scala/Play, but I come from the .NET world and with
Groovy/Grails I had something (very tiny) up on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
really fast.

The problem is I really don't know the underlying technology and I'm going to
hit several walls really soon :)

I chose it because I know a friend who works with it and is really happy and
evangelizes a bit :) . I never considered Scala/Play. My other option was
MVC4, but .NET is pretty expensive for an MVP (not many options for free or
cheap hosting, etc.) and I wanted to explore other options.

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Irene
Probably Scala/Play, but I would spend time learning and using both.

Here are job trends for these languages:
[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Groovy%2C+Grails%2C+Scala&...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Groovy%2C+Grails%2C+Scala&l=)

~~~
GFischer
Hmm Scala seems to be on the upswing, while Groovy/Grails seems to have
stagnated.

I've heard good things about it too :) .

~~~
vorg
Play! used to use both Scala and Groovy, but v 2.0 purged itself of all its
Groovy code, perhaps triggered by Grails dictator Graeme Rocher joining the
Groovy despotry 4 yrs ago (he didn't leave it until a few months ago). Whereas
Scala is used by more than one framework (Play!, Lift), I can't imagine anyone
would use Groovy to build anything not sanctioned by the Grails crowd.

