Grails over Groovy: What does it offer?

Question

I would like to know what are the advantages and disadvantages of using Grails over pure vanilla Groovy installation.

What functionalities does Grails bring to Groovy as a framework?

-What does it offer? Which functionalities and peculiarities does it bring? -What does it take away? -What does it enforce on the developer? -What liberties does it bring to the developer?

Finally,

-Why use Grails over pure Groovy? What would be the reasons?

-What do you need to give up to incorporate Grails for production? What kind of control do you let go? What kind of performance is jeopardised?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Grails is basically groovy + spring mvc + an ORM (gorm) + scaffolding scripts + the "convention over configuration" attitude of rails, etc.

So if you didn't need an orm (say, your web app was backed by a rest or soap api), using a servlet app written with groovy, or a spring mvc app with groovy, would be a reasonable choice.

Like Rails, Grails seems to be what I call "Strongly Grained". If you do things the Grails way, development is easy (and generally quite fast). The framework tends to have a preferred way of doing most things. On the other hand, if you need to go against the grain, you'll have a comparably rough time of it.

Answer 2

Groovy is a general purpose language that you can use to write almost any kind of software. Grails is a web framework that is used to develop web applications using the Groovy language. So I suppose you could say that Grails greatly simplifies developing web applications using Groovy.