I plan to start learning a Java web framework (I love the Java API) I have already used Rails and Django.
I want something close to Java but without all the complexity of J2EE.
I’ve found 2 frameworks that could be good for me:
Grails
Grails looks great, it uses Groovy which is better than Java for web application (I think..) but it’s slower than pure-java based frameworks (Hibernate, Strut, Spring) It looks pretty simple to deploy (send .war and it’s ok!), the GSP is great! It’s a bit harder to debug (need to restart the server at each modification and stacktraces contain a mix of Java and Groovy traces which is not always the easiest to understand)
Play!
This framework also looks great; it’s faster than Grails (It uses Java) but I don’t really like how it uses Java, it modifies the source code to transform the property calls as setXXX/getXXX, I do not like that… The framework also has a caching function that Grails does not have. I don’t really like the Template Engine.
It’s also easer to debug (no need to restart the server, stacktraces are clearer)
What do you recommend?
I am looking for something easy to learn (I have a lot of Ruby experience, not so much Java experience but I love the Java API), fully featured (That’s no a problem with all the Java Library available, but if it’s bundle and integrated I prefer), has good scalability and is not too slow (faster than Ruby) Ideally I would like to use a framework with a decent community to easily find support.
PS: I am not interested in JRuby on Rails
I’d suggest Grails. It has a bigger community than the play framework does (~350 plugins covering pretty much every basic need). Also, grails is written almost completely in Java, it just lets you use Groovy for your domain specific implementation.
If you do run into a performance issue where the groovy pages that you’ve created are the bottleneck, you can always just switch to a Java implementation. Then you’re in the same boat that you would have been with the Play framework all the time. You’ve optimized your development time by putting off the coding of things in Java till you know that you actually need to do it (which, in my experience is very rare).
I’m also not sure where you heard that you need to restart your server for each modification, but that’s actually not true. Grails supports reloading of controllers/gsps/services/domain objects, etc without restarting your server.
The mixed stacktraces can get a little long, but tool vendors (like Intellij) have made some recent improvements that strip out all the stacktrace portions that you don’t care about.
I’ve been using grails since the .5 days and have been very happy with the platform.