

A new approach to uptime monitoring with Grails - tlong
http://davydotcom.com/blog/2015-03-17-a-new-approach-to-uptime-monitoring

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jestar_jokin
I've been wondering, how does Grails compare with other JVM web frameworks in
2015? I like the rapid development/convention over configuration approach, but
I'm cautious about dynamic typing, and for some reason the syntax puts me off
(lack of punctuation makes everything blend together?).

~~~
Alex3917
The dynamic typing is optional. E.g. at the startup I work for, the convention
is to use static types for function signatures, and dynamic types within
functions.

In general though Groovy/Grails is actually surprisingly good. Groovy is much
easier to learn that Scala, more powerful than Python, and most Grails
conventions are fairly straightforward and easy to understand. Both Groovy and
Grails are a little bit under documented, which is frustrating, but not so bad
as to be a deal breaker. That said for my personal projects I use
Python/Django, only because the community is much stronger. And although I do
miss Groovy's closures, the strength of the libraries and ecosystem, as well
as the fact that it's easier to hire developers, more than make up for
whatever syntactical advantages that Groovy has.

~~~
babs474
>In general though Groovy/Grails is actually surprisingly good.

I'll second that. Groovy is amazing but under appreciated on places like
hacker news. Interesting that you bring up python because I find groovy very
pythonic in some ways. Even more so with the new type hinting stuff python is
introducing.

Although for lighter weight web stuff I've been watching the
[http://ratpack.io/](http://ratpack.io/) project.

~~~
vorg
> I'll second that. Groovy is amazing but under appreciated on places like
> hacker news

Did you know that VMWare pulled its funding for their 6 developers working on
Groovy and Grails last March? Two of them got jobs as Grails consultants for
Object Computing, two of them (one former Groovy tech and one former Grails)
got jobs at Gradleware working on Gradle, one (the former Groovy P.M.) an
unrelated job in France, and I don't know about the other one. There might not
be much more work or maintenance done on either Groovy or Grails from now on.

~~~
u04f061
>Did you know that VMWare pulled its funding for their 6 developers working on
Groovy and Grails last March? Because they shifted their focus to CloudFoundry
only. This does not mean that Groovy or Grails are going to die.

>There might not be much more work or maintenance done on either Groovy or
Grails from now on.

Yes. I am closely following grails development and you are true in this
regards. There was no doubt a disturbance in community and even we were
concerned about its future when we were in initial stages of our project.
Right now, we are confident that this duo won't die anytime soon.

>Two of them got jobs as Grails consultants for Object Computing,

Good for Grails future as OCI has been providing grails based services in the
past and is committed to grails future.

>two of them (one former Groovy tech and one former Grails) got jobs at
Gradleware working on Gradle

Gradle being Groovy based is being used in Grails as well. Again it is good
for the duo.

>one (the former Groovy P.M.) an unrelated job in France

How is restlet unrelated?

~~~
vorg
> Because they shifted their focus to CloudFoundry only

Although VMWare/Pivotal _said_ they were pulling their funding for Groovy and
Grails in order to shift their focus to CloudFoundry only, that doesn't
explain why they held onto Spring. Groovy/Grails and Spring were managed and
promoted together, and the more likely reason is the Spring team didn't want
Groovy/Grails attached and petitioned the VMWare managers to dump them.
Perhaps the Groovy and/or Grails people were trying to take over in some way.
Grails 3.0 released in March now bundles Gradle as well as Groovy and Spring
from before, perhaps another predatory move. It could explain why Gradleware
recently employed two of the retrenched Groovy/Grails developers from VMWare,
to help in protecting their product against takeover by bundling.

~~~
u04f061
Hmm. Your points seem promising and I can't disagree anymore. Why this
corporate world is so difficult to understand?

~~~
tlong
I personally haven't used grails much. But here's another good post from my
friend David Estes: [http://www.redwindsw.com/blog/2014-01-15-moving-from-
rails-t...](http://www.redwindsw.com/blog/2014-01-15-moving-from-rails-to-
grails-differences-and-similarities)

~~~
u04f061
I am not a rails developer but I have seen that rails developer have alot of
inertia and they won't switch to grails. Grails is only attracting Java
developers who are fed up of exhaustive configurations. Unfortunately books
written for grails also assume that you are switching from one of java to
grails.

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jaequery
Haven't tried yet but reading the feature list alone I'm sold !

