Rails or Grails?

Question

Grails vs Rails. Which has better support? And which one is a better choice to develop medium size apps with? Most importantly which one has more plug-ins?

Solution 1

One other thing worth mentioning: the design philosophy of both framework is somewhat different when it comes to the model. Grails is more "domain-oriented" while Rails is more "database-oriented".
In Rails, you essentially start by defining your tables (with field names and their specifics). Then ActiveRecord will map them to Ruby classes or models.
In Grails, it's the reverse: you start by defining your models (Groovy classes) and when you hit run, GORM (Grails ActiveRecord equivalent) will create the related database and tables (or update them). Which may also be why you don't have the concept of 'migrations' in Grails (although I think it will come in some future release).
I don't know if one is better than the other. I guess it depends on your context.

This being said, I'm still myself wondering which one to choose. As Tom was saying, if you're dependent on Java you can still go for JRuby - so Java reuse shouldn't be your sole criterion.

Solution 2

I guess if you are a Java developer and want to have access to all the existing enterprise Java libraries and functionality... go with Grails.

Solution 3

Rails is more mature, has more plugins, has a bigger userbase, has better documentation and support available. It can also run on JRuby giving access to Java libraries if you require.

Grails has some interesting qualities, but can't claim to be up there with rails just yet. However, if you're predominantly a Java or groovy developer you may prefer it. Otherwise though, I'd suggest using Rails for medium sized projects right now.

Solution 4

I say grails since there are so many java libraries out there. But I am a bit biased due to the fact that I come from a java background.

If the app isn't going to be big, either suffices - and the choice ought to depend on existing infrastructure. Say if you already have a java servlet container server running, you might as well stick with grails instead of provisioning another server for rails.

Solution 5

I used rails before and liked it quite a bit. However, my current company had a lot of legacy java code and therefore the natural choice was grails.

When I started with rails, very few sites were using it and documentation was atrocious. There was railscast that was great and railsforum.com, but anything out of the ordinary, you're on your own. Deploying it was a nightmare, and using mongrel-clusters was not really production ready. This is very different now as everybody can see, much more mature and deployed everywhere.

Over a year back, I had to learn grails due to reason I cited above. Transitioning to grails was very easy, since it is very similar to Rails. Again, it was very similar to the early stages of rails, with one huge difference. Because you can easily import java code, grails users can use almost all the production tested java libraries available out there. I've been able to successfully integrate our legacy java projects into grails projects and very little tweaking are needed. You will also notice that plugin development has been rapid, mainly because developers are just writing grails "hooks" but the underlying code are the old java libraries. Deploying grails is also just deploying a WAR file.

Another thing you have to look at is IDE. If you're comfortable with eclipse, then eclipse-STS for grails gives you all the bells and whistles. I still see a lot of rails developers use textmate, though rubymine has made great strides (the early version of rubymine used to grind my ubuntu to a halt).

The bottom line, both are great MVC frameworks. RoR is much more mature and has a lot more developers. Grails is where RoR was 3-4 years ago, but I see the progress a lot more faster. Hope this helps.

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