To create a web application on Google’s AppEngine I was looking for a framework. During my research I came across Groovy and Grails. I’m a Java kind of guy so I prefer something Java-like above Python frameworks (like Django). So I scraped together some information and decided that Groovy and Grails are both to my liking.
While trying to dig deeper into Grails in combination with AppEngine I found that the Grails GAE Plugin hasn’t been updaten in two years and on the website it says it “works with the latest Grails 1.3 RC2 release and above”[3]. The newest version of Grails (as of today) is 2.1.1[4]. So I’m wondering if the plugin is still maintained. Of course, the plugin could be so good, that it doesn’t need maintenance – but in my experience this really looks like the plugin is dead.
So what I would like to know if there are people out there currently working with (or have recently worked with) a recent version of Grails on AppEngine and whether it is a pain in the… fingertip or a solid framework.
If you believe that Grails on App-Engine is dead I would really like to hear about alternatives, so please let me know if you used a framework on AppEngine, what you used and how the experience was.
To be a bit more precise on my requirements; a framework I would want to use should
- be Java-like or Java
- run on Google AppEngine
- have some degree of scaffolding mechanism (I’m really lazy when it comes to writing code that could easily be able to generate)
- take away the pain of database handling with SQL by providing a solid NoSQL persistence layer
Before you link any other Stackoverflow posts in your answers, please be aware that I have done my research on stackoverflow before asking this, sadly I found no up-to-date information – of course I could have overlooked something, but please don’t link articles older than a year, it doesn’t help here.
Sorry for the long text, shorten if you like and deem it necessary.
Thank you in advance for your helpful answers.
I tried out Grails on App Engine using the plugin mentioned above. I wrote a series of blog postings about it. I don’t think the Grails App Engine plugin is actively maintained anymore.
I personally switched to Gaelyk which is a lightweight web toolkit for App Engine written in Groovy. It should fulfill all your requirements.