Grails 0.6 has been released, here’s the release post.
For those wondering what it is, Grails is a framework for the Java platform designed for high productivity. I started using it for a project with version 0.5, have since moved to 0.5.6, and will soon upgrade to this latest version.
While I appreciate Ruby on Rails’ ideas, I don’t like Ruby itself as a language. We also know several clients that have Java as their standard platform, so Ruby on Rails or even Plone-based projects were out of the question. Groovy on Grails also caught my eye because, underneath, it’s all Java - so we had the wealth of Java libraries available to draw from.
Development is a breeze, and whenever I’ve encountered something that wasn’t well explained in the documentation the Grails community has been extremely helpful.
We’ve had no stability issues or performance issues, even though it’s months away from a 1.0 release and we’re testing it on a server with limited specs. The speed is beyond what I expected: pages that take a second or so on development on my Core2Duo 2.33GHz are spit out in milliseconds on the live site, which is running on one of Zone.net’s lower-end VU200 virtual servers.
Productivity has been great, even considering the learning curve. I came to Grails with no knowledge of Spring or Hibernate, and have had on occasion to learn not only of Grails and Groovy but the foundation it’s based on. Even so, in most cases it’s been out of curiosity for how something is being done behind the scenes (much time spent scrying Hibernate logs or looking at the generated db structure).
For me, the best thing so far was realizing that for the first time in a while it was taking me longer to come up with an implementation or design that I felt happy with than to actually execute it, and to experience how easy it is to change courses if I come up with something better. No “crap, if we do it better we’ve got to throw away three day’s worth of code” resistance.
That means my time is being used where it’s truly useful, and I’m ending up with approaches I’m happy with.
I’m absolutely sold.