james mckay dot net

(Update: it appears that I misjudged Grails here. The author of Grails has advised me that it is built on mature, tried and tested Java technologies such as Hibernate, Spring, and so on, and it seems that Groovy is not just another random programming language but an extension of Java itself to incorporate language features such as closures, dynamic typing and operator overloading. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend the lecture myself, but it may well be worth checking out if you are a Sussex based Java developer. More details are in the comments.)

I was asked today if I’m interested in going to a lecture at Sussex University on a new web framework called Grails, which is written in a language called Groovy that runs on the Java platform.

Not really.

One glance tells me it’s Yet Another Rails Copycat. It seems that everyone and his dog are writing them these days, and most of them are completely unnecessary. If I really wanted to do something Rails-ish on the Java platform I’d use Rails with JRuby.

The fact of the matter is that while it’s worth knowing two or three different web frameworks, some of them are just too niche to bother with. Groovy is currently at number 32 in Tiobe’s Top Fifty, just above PL/I, Smalltalk and Haskell, with half the popularity of Fortran and a third of the popularity of Scheme. And nobody except Paul Graham writes web applications in Scheme.

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Posted at 15:16 in Programming