RSS feedCopycat frameworks
(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.
Posted at 15:16 on 7 March 2008.
Feel free to take a look round the site — if I
say anything that 
20:28
That’s a shame. As a fellow Sussex resident (Brighton), and the creator of Grails, it always disappoints me to see how closed minded the Ruby community can be.
Grails takes a very different approach by building on existing Java libraries (Spring, Hibernate, Quartz, Sitemesh etc.) and has features of its own that are worth looking at even for a Rails developer (domain driven development, web flow, declarative transactions etc.)
Do you know who is giving the lecture? I would love to get in touch.
12:10
Hi Graeme — sorry, I didn’t realise Grails was “local produce.” With these things I tend to think of them by default as coming out of that great amorphous blob called the USA. It looks like you’ve got quite a good framework going, but as I said, there are a lot of them out there jostling for my attention, and when you’re considering these things you need to draw the line somewhere otherwise you’ll never get any work done.
The lecture (rootles around in inbox to try and find the e-mail) seems to be something to do with the Sussex Linux User Group and the British Computer Society. It’s on the 12th of March and it’s called “Build a Web Booking Program in an Hour with Grails.” There’s some information about it on the Sussex BCS home page at http://www.sussex.bcs.org.uk/ — the lecturer is a certain Dr Peter Lappo.