August 19, 2009, 6:31 am
Inspired by Rails, other Web frameworks now incorporate many of its features. Grails is at the forefront of this group. In fact, at first blush, Grails mimics Rails so closely that it’s tricky to tell them apart. However, as you dig more deeply, differences begin to appear. Most importantly, Grails is built upon an enterprise-worthy Java stack. This includes Hibernate and Spring, two tools that many Java developers are already familiar with.
Whether Grails can truly scale to the enterprise level remains largely untested. What is easier to verify is that Grails adds many Java best practices to a Rails-like framework. While scriptlets are a possibility, they are generally eschewed in favor of tag libraries. Grails offers superior support for Unicode, and encourages developers to use message bundles. Both of the latter features make Grails a much better choice for internationalization…
