Last nights Grails eXchange user group sessions were a lot of fun and it was great to see so many people there. Our session was about the use of Groovy, Grails and dynamic languages in real-world architectures. Rather than a presentation we opted for an open discussion, which I think went really well, particularly considering the size of the room and number of people that were present. Here's my summary of the discussion.

• Performance : Groovy/Grails are fast enough for a large number of use cases. Of everybody that said they were using Groovy/Grails, nobody cited performance problems. Of course, should you have problems, you can always drop out into pure Java code.
• Productivity : This was the number 1 reason for choosing Groovy and Grails - everybody said that it dramatically simplified the task at hand. From writing algorithms that non-developers will understand through to building websites and RESTful web services quickly - Groovy and Grails let you get the job done quicker. The only downside here is that some of the tools (e.g. Eclipse) don't have mature support yet.
• Modularity : Even if you don't want to invest in a full stack Grails application, you have some options around introducing it incrementally into an organisation. An example of this was the use of Grails as the web tier for a regular Java EE application.
• Commercial support : One of the reasons often cited for not choosing an open source technology is that commercial support isn't available. I've seen this myself before, but at least with Groovy and Grails you can now get this through G2One.

So there you have it - take a look at Groovy and Grails because they might just be more applicable for your applications than you think. See you at the next user group, which is scheduled for Tuesday, 6th of November and will (most likely) be about virtualisation and its role in the software development process.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 19 October 2007 17:31:00 BST #