Monday, December 26, 2011

Rapid Web Development with Groovy/Grails


I have been working on Groovy/Grails for past 6 months and it’s being an amazing experience. In less than 4 months time we have been able to create a new web application from scratch and deploy in production.
First, it’s Groovy which makes coding so easy that anybody will fall in love with it. A piece of code that would have taken 10 lines of code in JAVA can be written in couple of lines in groovy. On top of it is a web framework i.e. Grails, which makes web development look like child’s play. Yes, believe me or not, it’s truth that I have experienced. Atleast after working purely in java with frameworks like JSF, Struts etc., I feel so.
Developing Web 2.0 application has never been easy before. Thanks to Grails plugins which makes almost everything possible in just few minutes of time. One can get started and develop sample application in just 5 mins as explained in this video, but it would not be sufficient enough to develop enterprise application. But it took me around 1 month to get comfort level on both Groovy and Grails which I believe is very less considering the fact that it's not just about learning a new tool, it's about learning a new language and a web framework which spawns across all layer i.e presentation, business and persistent.

It's the simplicity of the language and web framework that makes it look so simple to learn and implement. When I started many people told me that it's not for enterprise development where heavy load is expected. But after working for 6 months I think that's not true. It's just that one should have sufficient experience so that not to use Grails in wrong way. There are various optimization techniques one need to understand and model their application accordingly.

There is lot to learn and share in this space which I would be doing going forward. In this blog I just wanted to share my thoughts about Groovy and Grails and would definitely recommend for rapid development.

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