Groovy and Grails are both amazing, been doing development for quite sometime and have tried various languages. Can honestly for a new web based application I would chose Grails over the others.
20 karma · joined August 28, 2011
For those coming from PHP, Python and Rails the thought of using something based on Java frameworks may be a turnoff but I assure you all the boilerplating and configuration complexity is hidden away with the preference being the convention over configuration approach.
The beauty though is if you need to reach down and leverage some specifics you are free to do so, Grails doesn't tie your hands allowing you to have your cake and eat it to.
So in a nutshell, Grails gives you all the things you love with frameworks like Rails while under the Hood you can leverage the power of Java and all the supporting libraries and frameworks developed for it over the years. Anywhere it can go Grails&Groovy can go to (well almost). Oh and in terms of performance, the upcoming version of Groovy 2.0 will provide performance enhancements that will bring it seriously close to Java execution through static type checking and compilation. These two options are once again free to use or ignore as the developer sees fit.
I personally like Grails which uses Groovy for the programming language. To enhance performance and obtain near Java like speed there is a statically typed extension called Groovy++. Because it operates heavily off of type inference it is extremely non-intrusive when being introduced to existing code.
Yes it is for the same site I've mentioned here in the past and can be seen in my submission history.
I didn't want to mix it in with the topic so people wouldn't think I was using it to further promote the project :)
I have had interest expressed by many people in the past to help out but what I have experienced is that when it comes to really getting down to it and doing real work, that interest dissipates very rapidly. :)
You are correct about the time constraint and perhaps I could pay for some of the work and perhaps that is the only way, but then I need to get into finding the correct person and are they really going to be able to do the work and such.
Having the right partner would simply things but finding one will probably not be so easy.
It has all the great features you get with Ruby/Rails but built on two solid time tested technologies being Spring and Hibernate. Not to mention the ability to integrate with pretty much no effort with existing Java infrastructures.
I'm the sole developer of this site which is not funded so it would be an equity position initially which is why I was mentioning partner. I know this is a big turn-off for most but it is what it is.