In Search Of The Holy 'Grails'

Are you like me and you develop in Java but you keep encountering this constant raving about this Ruby On Rails phenomenon that keeps getting so much bandwidth in the online rags? Not? Well okay, but that's been my experience, so sit there and pay attention anyway. It'll be interesting, I hope.

In preparing to develop a greenfield web application recently I decided to get my hands dirty with this holy grail known as Ruby On Rails. I have to say I was very impressed with it. From the outset I was constantly thinking "Hmm, well that's quite clever, I wish Java web development was more like that." Honest, over and over again. From how it creates this complete project skeleton, to how the scripts generate all this stuff for you, to their philosophies of Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) and Convention over Configuration. And I thought to myself: "Self, this Ruby On Rails thing isn't new anymore, and you haven't done Java web development for a while, so why not see if there's anything that's been done in the Java web world to address this approach that Ruby on Rails has taken?" So I went to look for something holistic in its approach, like Rails, but that leverages the wealth of Java technology that already exists.

At first I didn't find anything that was obvious from the usual headlines on The Server Side, or on InfoQ or on OnJava, or Javaworld and so on and so forth. The usual suspects of Struts 2 , Tapestry and Spring's WebMVC grabbed most of the headlines, and I was trying to get away from their XML configuration conflagration (sorry, that was a mouthful). I did encounter a web framework called Stripes, which seemed to make a reasonable effort, but that still wasn't quite what I felt I was looking for. Then by chance I came across Grails.

As the name implies, it borrows heavily from the philosophies of Rails and at last I'd found something that 'seemed' to do what I felt a Java approach could do, if it mimicked Rails. Like Rails, Grails uses Groovy just like Rails uses Ruby. Groovy is, for all intent and purpose, a Java scripting language. Grails uses Groovy to empower itself and accomplish various tasks with a minimal set of lines. Grails was initiated by Guillaume LaForge and founded by Steven Devijver and Graeme Rocher - who is the current Project Lead. It's still fairly young but I've communicated with an Australian, Glen Smith, who is using v0.4 in production projects. As a South African, trusting an Australian defies common sense, but hey, us Southern Hemispherians have to stick together.

So I thought I'd try out Grails and log my experience here. If you just kick the tyres it won't reveal much about the vehicle. You need to take it for a test drive, and not just amble up and down the road.

So seatbelts on, here we go.