Grails, a new take on Java web app development
At our company we first used Rails for an eCommerce solution as well as for prototyping. Although working with Rails was great at first one problem remained: Essentially being a Java shop and relying on various libraries like Hibernate, Spring and Lucene we basically would always have had to write glue code in addition to the actual Ruby and Java code.
In 2007 we came across a shiny new web application framework called Grails that used standard Java libraries like Hibernate and Spring for establishing principles like DRY and Convention over Configuration. Our company so far has used Grails for our vertical search engine GameSear.ch and our widget service ContentSieve.
With Grails we have found a web application framework that suits our needs in pretty much every respect:
- DRY and Convention over Configuration
- Being able to write code in a dynamically typed language like Groovy and a statically typed language like Java just as needed
- Being able to draw upon the huge amount of mature third-party software that’s available for free in the Java eco-system
