Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Grails Shines at SpringOne

Last night Rod Johnson kicked-off the 2008 springOne conference with a keynote emphasizing the new SpringSource slogan "Weapons for the War on Java Complexity."  During the first day of the conference, no technology fit that billing more than Grails.

In the first session of the day, "Grails for Spring Developers", Graeme Rocher wowed the crowd by building Twitter in 40 minutes.  It was really impressive to see how quickly Graeme created a full-blown twitter application including all the functionality twitter users are familiary with.  Not to mention the necessary application infrastructure including authentication, authorization, database persistence, caching, JMS messaging, Quartz scheduling, and email.

Graeme added each feature using many of the popular Grails plugins available today including:
By demonstrating these features, Graeme really backed up his statements that "Grails is more than just a CRUD framework" and that it offers "all the benefits of rapid application development without sacraficing the underlying power of Spring."  It appears that we may see more Grails integration with other Spring technologies such as Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi and Spring Integration in the future.  Only time will tell, but Grails was mentioned by presenters in each of the presentations I attended today.

In Rod Johnson's keynote last night, he mentioned that in the last year, the number of Grails downloads have increased from 7000 to 70,000/month.  It may be a bit early, but it's starting to appear as though Grails truly is the future of enterprise java development.

5 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

as long Groovy is 60 time slower than Java ... and slower than JRuby (have great architecture and isnt writed as toy) I can't talk about Grails have enterprise future. Maybe whene we have java 1.7 and Groovy will be rewriten with invoke dynamic then I can change my opinion :)

rhyolight said...

Grails isn't that slow (more like 6-20 times slower, depending on usage). And it keeps getting faster. Anyways, in most enterprise apps, the slowdowns that occur during communication with other service (db calls, service calls, etc.) dwarf the the actual Groovy execution time. And in the fringe cases when you need speed, just use java.

Graeme Rocher said...

@Sliwa

1) On current benchmarks the upcoming Groovy 1.6 release which Grails 1.1 will feature is faster than JRuby

2) In my benchmarks Grails has roughly 75% of the performance of raw Spring MVC and Hibernate

Nicolas Marchildon said...

Grails is not entirely Groovy. It re-uses a lot of Java code, so if Groovy is slower, the impact should be minimal, from what I understand.