Saturday 19 January 2008

Grails, be agile my friend

This month I've been testing Grails, (it was in my Todo list some time ago).
First I've read some about Groovy, and it's really easy the syntax and I like it.

Then, I've read about Grails architecture and the User Guide.

Impressions.


My impresion it's Grails is not much diferent than Appfuse, step by step:
  • GORM and Domain Model, is based in JPA and Hibernate. (domain centric approach explained by icoloma)
  • Controllers are based in Spring MVC.
  • IoC with Spring (of course).
  • Layouts based in Sitemesh.
  • Also you have Web Flow with Spring Web Flow.
  • Both are a simple WAR file.
This similars are very good for me, because I'm an old user of Appfuse and maybe can adapt Appfuse applications to Grails, I and can achive more agility.

Enterprise Ready?

Graeme Rocher gave a kick ass to someone that say no :D. I think it's ready, you have to take care about your code like in any other language.

The only thing I miss, is better support for Groovy and GSP in Eclipse (autocompletion, refactor) and manage the dependencies.

update: Guillaume Laforge thoughts about Enterprise Ready

5 comments:

Guillaume Laforge said...

Regarding Enterprise-readiness of Groovy, I've added a few more thoughts on my blog on this topic.

marcospereira said...

Manage dependencies is easy when using Ivy. Take a look:
http://grails.codehaus.org/Ivy+Integration

dahernan said...

Thanks Marcos, I didn't know it was so easy.

I don't like so much Ivy, I'll try to use it, but I'm maven addict

Matt Raible said...

I think it'd be pretty cool to create an AppFuse plugin for Grails - so you have all of AppFuse's features out-of-the-box for your Grails application.

dahernan said...

This could be great!, I'm using appfuse themes in my grails application because translate sitemesh layout is so easy, and I like more appfuse stylesheet.