Is Grails a viable option for large scale enterprise web apps?

Question

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!

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

For some previous discussion on this topic take a look at

• Is Grails worth it? (from late 2008)
• Is Grails (now) worth it? (from 2010)