Ask YC: Pros and Cons of building with Groovy | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Pros and Cons of building with Groovy

5 pointstransburgh6 comments

Does anyone have experience with building a site in Groovy (Java based)? Would you recommend / not recommend it? Thanks.

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I launched a personal project built with Grails a couple months ago. You might want to check it out at http://feedlr.com (which is a mashup inspired by twitterfeed)

IMHO Grails/Groovy is really good stuff that's worth checking out. Groovy as a dynamic language on JVM is by all means fun to work with compared to Java itself. Also being a Python guy, I don't feel like Groovy is any less fun than Python, the former with more syntactic sugars. Once trying Groovy you won't want to go back to Java any more. And Grails as a Rails-like framework for the JVM stack is like nothing else in the world of Java frameworks. It's a breeze to live with. And a perfect match for Groovy.

Having said all that, I think the biggest low point for Grails/Groovy now is its community. It's far less mature than the comparable others like Python or Ruby. The G's are like the minorities.

Edit: The framework/language themselves are also still their immature state. It's not uncommon that I find weird bugs caused by bugs of the framework itself.

And if you build your personal project using Grails, hosting is another problem to worry about. There are simply far less choices than Python, PHP, or even Ruby. You have to deploy to the Java stack and there are barely any cheap and usable Java hosting services out there. So I finally landed my project on a VPS at linode.

But the landscape seems to be slowing changing in favor of Grails though. Now mor.ph is providing easy hosting for Grails alongside with Rails. There's also a blog post on LinkedIn posted yesterday which shares their experience with Grails. It's definitely worth checking out: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/linkedinblog/~3/31010...

Having used RoR and Spring fairly extensively, I was convinced that Groovy, and more specifically Grails, would be great to work with. Fun? Check. New? Check. Bleeding edge unstable? Check. Extremely difficult to figure out how to do things you already knew how to do with Spring or RoR? Check.

I just wasn't able to ever get efficient with the platform and ended up having to figure out how to expose Spring internals to do the stuff I wanted to do.

I would recommend building something with Grails if it's a personal project but not for anything commercial or production.

I don't get a great feeling from Groovy. It seems to inhabit something of a no-man's land between Java versions of popular languages like Python and Ruby, Scala and other more experimental languages, and plain old Java. That's just a vague sensation though, based on reading things over the years.

A friend of mine tried Groovy for real work a while back and he didn't seem very impressed with it from a robustness/polish and performance point of view. It has to be said that he's a heavily IDE-pampered Java head, so he might have higher standards of polish than you (or I) do.

German c't magazine recently did a feature on it and they seemed to like it.

Personally, it's a bit too close to Java for my tastes; there are plenty of decent JVM languages out there if that's a strong criterion for you. Clojure's my favourite, but it's absolutely not the way to go if you're not into functional programming.

I started a (commercial) project with Rails, and eventually, when we needed some 3rd party libraries that Java provides moved to running it on top of JRuby.

Since then we've been getting the best of both worlds IMO - our code is more mixed now, where most is still Ruby based so it's fun, easy, simple and fast (to develop), but some things are done with Java - when it needs to run fast, or we can't find a comparable ruby library to do something.

In short, instead of Groovy, and in view of the rest of the comments here regarding its maturity, why not consider JRuby?

There are a lot of complaints about Groovy's performance in the past year. Check out some bench marks before you decide to use it for anything other than simple scripting jobs.

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