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Coming from a J2EE dev background, I love the idea of Grails....all the benefits of using enterprise Java (Spring, Hibernate, etc. ), but with the simplicity of Rails (scaffolding, convention over configuration, Groovy scripting, etc.). My company is considering rolling out a new enterprise scale web application built on top of Grails. I heard there were some problems with stability and defects in earlier releases of the platform. However, I haven't seem many complaints since becoming part of Springsource.

I am curious if anyone has any opinions or experience in using Grails for large scale web apps. Is it stable? Reliable? Any gotchas I should look out for? Any other observations? Thanks!

Jeff
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    A year and a half later, I just want to share my thoughts with everyone. Grails is DEFINITELY a good choice for Enterprise Web Apps. There is some overhead, but if you are planning to have a Spring / Hibernate stack anyway, Grails is a no brainer. There is a good discussion here about Grails overhead (or lack thereof) and its choice as a stable and reliable enterprise platform. http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Will-Grails-lose-performance-war-39757.S.90956510?qid=d02cf15e-0f04-4ec7-9404-a6c5cf75cc4d&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmp_39757 – Jeff Feb 07 '12 at 19:38
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    For anyone interested...I have published a Case Study that shows the viability of using Grails with the Weceem plugin for a very high volume commercial website. http://www.thorntech.com/2012/09/case-study-high-traffic-mobile-website-using-grails-and-weceem-plugin/ – Jeff Sep 06 '12 at 18:48

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Short Answer

Yes

Longer Answer

Stability and reliability of the core has improved considerably since 1.0. It seems that each new release introduces a few bugs, but workarounds/fixes tend to emerge pretty quickly In terms of performance, Grails has always been adequate (for my purposes). Given that Grails is really a Groovy DSL for Spring MVC and Hibernate, and most of Grails is actually written in Java, it would be surprising if Grails' performance was substantially different from a Java web framework like Spring MVC.

The situation is very different when it comes to Grails plugins. Most of these are maintained by the community rather than the Grails team and are much more likely to be abandoned, or fail to keep up with newer versions of Grails. The officially supported plugins (e.g. Spring Security) are of course an exception to this statement.

Dónal
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  • Thanks! So far I have avoided plugins all together. I am overcoming the (minor) learning curve now and my productivity is pretty high. As long as the performance holds up, I think it will be an excellent design choice. – Jeff Aug 04 '10 at 10:30
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For some previous discussion on this topic take a look at

Community
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matt b
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  • The second link was a real help. Thank you! Most of the comments I found while searching (here and Google) were outdated - people griping about 1.0. I wanted to know if most of those gripes have now been addressed. Really the only concern I have now is performance. So far my app is performing well, but I have have not yet designed any complicated queries. As long as I am careful (ie - avoid n+1 problem), I am expecting it to hold up fine. I sure hope that is the case! – Jeff Aug 04 '10 at 10:33
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I'd say yes, as long Grails 2.0+. With Grails 3.0 which is based on Spring Boot, you can improve developer productivity a lot more.

This Pivotal article justifies it.

http://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal/case-studies/netflix-amazon-asgard-groovy-grails-elastically-scaling-apps-for-40-million-internet-tv-viewers

Kevin Tan
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