Ask HN: Does anybody use Grails?

9 points·humbleMouse··4 comments

I never see anything on HN about Grails and I don't seem to hear anybody talk about Grails in my day to day life. Is there anybody out there using it?

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The company I work for has released a couple products in grails (SaaS). Ultimately, it's basically a "wrapper" around very common Java tech (like Spring WebMVC). It's really nice to use to build things quickly, but when Groovy was dropped by their main sponsor (Pivotal), our company kind of lost faith in the future of the language.

Since Grails 3.0, Grails is a wrapper around Gradle also. The Grails 1.0 backing company G2One,Inc got bought by SpringSource a year after it was formed, which was the true purpose of Grails bundling Spring, i.e. to muscle in on SpringSource's consulting business until it hurt.

So I guess the true purpose of Grails 3.0 bundling Gradle is for OSI's Grails consulting arm to get bought by Gradleware to similarly protect its Gradle consulting cashflow. Earlier this year, Grails' previous backer Pivotal,Inc dropped sponsorship of Grails effective a few days before Grails 3.0 was released, which was very conveniently picked up by OSI,Inc, minus 4 mainly Groovy developers who were retrenched. It all looked like a cost cutting exercise by the Grails P.M. in disguise.

The lack of scruples in the people behind Grails is reason enough to ignore it.

I used it professionally for two years. It's pretty good, the main issues just stem from the community being smaller, in terms of plugins that you'd want either missing or else being out of date.

Groovy itself is comparable to Python, even better in some ways.

I use it in a number of projects. I did rails dev for years, and Grails is very easy to pick up if you have rails+java experience. Groovy is also a great language. Add Vaadin for front-end dev and it can be a very fun, productive stack to use.

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