Rails vs Grails

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi, are there any really unbiased comparisons between rails and grails, and to which each framework is better suited for?

I'm coming from a java background, but I am not against using a non java solution if it's actually better. I am a little concerned with performance though. The site needs to really work well with 200,000 visits a day, and that's going to grow.

I started to use grails, and it's all well and good, but there's some things i don't like about it.

1) The tests take forever to run

2) IntelliJ IDEA reports integration tests as passing and displays a green light, even though they fail. The test output stinks, so running them on the command line and checking an html test results file is the only thing you can do. This is awful.

3) Apparently saving a domain class that violates constraints does not throw an exception when testing. I can understand for production saves, but for tests?! It is so important to get good feedback rather than silence failures that do nothing. Maybe over time, I will just "know", but I can hardly see how silent failures are more productive. I spent 30-45 minutes wondering why the test was failing because it looked totally fine and mirrored the examples.

4) It has slow code->browser cycles.. and sometimes you gotta restart tomcat anyway because the class loading blows up. It happens a lot more than they say it does.

The one thing I have against rails/ruby is that I hate their method names. Underscores are confusing to me because they sort of look like operators. Maybe can get used to this, but I hate methods like to_s for toString. That stuff is going to drive me nuts.

Anyway, our site has to support a lot of traffic, requires a lot of cron-like stuff built into the application, and we'll need to support relational databases and something like cassandra.

Suggestions?

2

Hi, are there any really unbiased comparisons between rails and grails, and to which each framework is better suited for?

Rails is better suited to people that know Ruby but not Java. Grails is better suited to people that know Java but not Ruby.

I started to use grails, and it's all well and good, but there's some things i don't like about it.

<snipped a bunch of off topic rambling>

I'd suggest taking these issues up on a Grails mailing-list might get you some constructive ideas as to how to overcome them.

The one thing I have against rails/ruby is that I hate their method names. Underscores are confusing to me because they sort of look like operators. Maybe can get used to this, but I hate methods like to_s for toString. That stuff is going to drive me nuts.

Personal preference certainly plays a big part in any platform choice; but there's hardly a lot our input can do about whether you "like" underscores or not.

Anyway, our site has to support a lot of traffic, requires a lot of cron-like stuff built into the application, and we'll need to support relational databases and something like cassandra.

You can write poor-performing or well-performing applications in either.

Unfortunately for your quest to make a decision, both Rails and Grails support relational databases and "things like cassandra" (as well as cassandra specifically), so that's not edging either of them toward a preference.

3

Michael Pavling wrote:

Hi, are there any really unbiased comparisons between rails and grails, and to which each framework is better suited for?

Rails is better suited to people that know Ruby but not Java. Grails is better suited to people that know Java but not Ruby.

The information I have come across from people who know both frameworks and languages well is that Rails is better designed and easier to work with than Grails.

My former boss wrote probably the largest Groovy project in the history of the language. He later switched his business over to being a Rails consultancy. I think it's significant that with all his Groovy experience, he didn't choose Grails.

I started to use grails, and it's all well and good, but there's some things i don't like about it.

<snipped a bunch of off topic rambling>

I'd suggest taking these issues up on a Grails mailing-list might get you some constructive ideas as to how to overcome them

Yes, indeed.

The one thing I have against rails/ruby is that I hate their method names. Underscores are confusing to me because they sort of look like operators. Maybe can get used to this, but I hate methods like to_s for toString. That stuff is going to drive me nuts.

Personal preference certainly plays a big part in any platform choice; but there's hardly a lot our input can do about whether you "like" underscores or not.

To the OP: you think an underscore looks like an *operator*? What operator does it look like? What are you in danger of confusing it with?

Personally, I'd rather use underscores. Their width looks more like spaces and lets me parse words more quickly. I find that my_variable_name reads almost like spaced text, whereas myVariableName looks clunky, computerish, and undifferentiated. (Larry Wall basically said the same thing in one of his Perl style guides, FWIW.)

Anyway, our site has to support a lot of traffic, requires a lot of cron-like stuff built into the application, and we'll need to support relational databases and something like cassandra.

You can write poor-performing or well-performing applications in either.

Unfortunately for your quest to make a decision, both Rails and Grails support relational databases and "things like cassandra" (as well as cassandra specifically), so that's not edging either of them toward a preference.

Best,

4

The decision could have been based solely on business grounds, not technical grounds.

People have heard of Rails, there is ‘brand awareness’ for Rails, so you more likely to be able to get clients. Or at least it would be easier convincing them that Rails is what they want rather than something called Grails that no one has heard of. Even the dimmest PHB has heard of Rails and that it is HOT

Not saying that there aren’t technical reasons to reject Grails but on purely business grounds Rails is king. So your former bosses decision might not be a reflection as to the technical merits of Grails.

5

The information I have come across from people who know both frameworks and languages well is that Rails is better designed and easier to work with than Grails.

My former boss wrote probably the largest Groovy project in the history of the language. He later switched his business over to being a Rails consultancy. I think it's significant that with all his Groovy experience, he didn't choose Grails.

That is interesting.

To the OP: you think an underscore looks like an *operator*? What operator does it look like? What are you in danger of confusing it with?

Part of the problem for me is that I really can't see well. this-that and this_that kind of look the same to me.

Also, I do a lot of scala recently. That language uses _ as a wildcard, so using _ in variable names (even though that isn't very idiomatic of the platform) would be incredibly confusing.

Anyway, I can probably live with the underscores even though I've been typing camelCase for 10+ years. The API is the real worry. I don't like how many of the methods/functions are named. I think, was it really so hard to call to_s to_string? When I type in an IDE, I literally type "t" and press ctrl-space and select the method I want. I can ctrl-shift-space and it'll just guess and type the rest of it for me.

Personally, I'd rather use underscores. Their width looks more like spaces and lets me parse words more quickly. I find that my_variable_name reads almost like spaced text, whereas myVariableName looks clunky, computerish, and undifferentiated. (Larry Wall basically said the same thing in one of his Perl style guides, FWIW.)

Part of this is experience. If you've been using perl, php, etc., then the underscores look okay. If you haven't, then they don't. Consistency is the key. That's also my problem with them. In PHP, you never know if it's "teardown" or "tear_down". There are so many problems with the API in PHP that it just left a massive sour taste in my mouth. Of course, the same problem happens with camel case, but the ide support for java has been much better than php, so it was less of a problem :wink:

6

The decision could have been based solely on business grounds, not technical grounds.

People have heard of Rails, there is 'brand awareness' for Rails, so you more likely to be able to get clients. Or at least it would be easier convincing them that Rails is what they want rather than something called Grails that no one has heard of. Even the dimmest PHB has heard of Rails and that it is *HOT*

Not saying that there aren't technical reasons to reject Grails but on purely business grounds Rails is king. So your former bosses decision might not be a reflection as to the technical merits of Grails.

When it comes to performance, how is Rails? Like if I were to design a raw Spring/Hibernate app, which I'm not going to... but let's say I did. What is the comparative performance with something like that, even though it probably isn't a fair comparison.

Also, how well to do the tests run? Imagine a system with a few thousand unit/integration tests. How long will it take to get all the tests to run?

Is it hard to build cron-like events in rails/ruby? Can I do that inside of my app where it's hosted? In the java world, we have quartz to do this (and probably some others).

Also, is it a good idea to use rails 3.0 even if it's in beta if the app is not going to production for awhile?

Thanks!

7

egervari wrote:

purely business grounds Rails is king. So your former bosses decision might not be a reflection as to the technical merits of Grails.

When it comes to performance, how is Rails? Like if I were to design a raw Spring/Hibernate app, which I'm not going to... but let's say I did. What is the comparative performance with something like that, even though it probably isn't a fair comparison.

Rails can perform quite well. Hulu and Ravelry are both known for being high-traffic Rails sites with excellent performance.

Also, how well to do the tests run? Imagine a system with a few thousand unit/integration tests. How long will it take to get all the tests to run?

It depends. On lots of things.

Is it hard to build cron-like events in rails/ruby? Can I do that inside of my app where it's hosted? In the java world, we have quartz to do this (and probably some others).

I believe there's a gem for this, though I've never tried to do it.

Also, is it a good idea to use rails 3.0 even if it's in beta if the app is not going to production for awhile?

I wouldn't quite yet, particularly if you're not familiar with Rails or Ruby.

Thanks!

Best,

8

How long has the Rails community waited to hear the second half of that statement!

Best Regards, Mohit. 20/5/2010 | 8:54 PM.

9

When it comes to performance, how is Rails? Like if I were to design a

raw Spring/Hibernate app, which I’m not going to… but let’s say I

did. What is the comparative performance with something like that,

even though it probably isn’t a fair comparison.

Sorry I do not have sufficient experience to help you with this.

Also, how well to do the tests run? Imagine a system with a few

thousand unit/integration tests. How long will it take to get all the

tests to run?

This depends on your tests. A massive amount of badly written tests are going to take a long time to run regardless of the language. The choice of language is not going to mitigate bad design or coding.

Is it hard to build cron-like events in rails/ruby? Can I do that

inside of my app where it’s hosted? In the java world, we have quartz

to do this (and probably some others).

We (where I work) are a Linux shop and we use cron extensively to push and pull data to keep our systems up to date.

Here is the plugin we use http://github.com/PeterHickman/Crons-for-Rails there is also some bits and pieces on my blog if it might help ( http://peter-hickman.blogspot.com/ )

There are other tools but this deploys the crons with the site using capistrano and installs them all in one go. Works for us.

Also, is it a good idea to use rails 3.0 even if it’s in beta if the

app is not going to production for awhile?

To be honest we haven’t even looked at 3 yet. I’m pretty sure that we have at least one 2.0.X site still running. I would base your decisions on what is available now, it’s not like all the Rails 2.X code is going to suddenly stop working the day 3 goes live.

10

Hi,

Hi, are there any really unbiased comparisons between rails and grails, and to which each framework is better suited for?

Having worked with both extensively, though a lot more with Grails as of lately, I dare say that it all boils down to a matter of personal taste. There is no way to objectively say which one's better.

Each has its own advantages and gotchas. There are things which are very easy with Grails (as in 'install plugin and your done') like implementing login facilities or running jobs. However, there are also things that are equally easy with Rails which are not so easy with Grails.

At my company we mostly use Grails and for very good reasons but there sure are just as many good reasons for using Rails.

1) The tests take forever to run

This is a well-known problem. The cause for this is JVM startup time. For the time being Grails offers an interactive mode that starts a JVM and allows you to run commands like test-app without incurring a JVM startup penalty for each run. Besides, the Grails team is also working on improving testing in various ways for the next major release.

4) It has slow code->browser cycles.. and sometimes you gotta restart tomcat anyway because the class loading blows up. It happens a lot more than they say it does.

This used to be a problem with 1.0.x and 1.1.x but shouldn't really occur anymore nowadays. At least it doesn't for us and we do a lot of Grails development

11

You might want to try to change the font in your editor to one that is designed to be easy to differentiate similar characters. Personally, I use ProFont Tweaked [1], but Sheldon is good too.

[1] http://www.tobias-jung.de/seekingprofont/      There is a "linux" version, but I just have the Windows TFF installed in Ubuntu

12

TTF.... silly fingers :-/

13

I'm on the same situation, I know both Java and Ruby, and I am looking for a language that I could use both for administration scripting and web sites,

I tried a little bit both of Grails and Rails

Rails is easer to use, but it looks like LOTS of plugins/gems are no more compatibles with the lasts versions of Ruby (1.9.2) and Rails (3.0.1) (ex: the Qt4 binding for ruby), but I hope this will change with time :slight_smile: Another thing that I don't really like about Rails is that I don't feel like if I had control on the web stack, most of things are "magic" and I don't always understand what it does on the background... But rails has a perfect caching system and clustering way (memcached!), it's also very easy to profile and debug. And the most important: There is a HUGE community !

Grails also has some advantages, it's template engine if perfect (GSP) (I like it really more than ERB, tag based templates are more clean), and it includes ACEGI (the perfect authentication engine ;p) but the caching system is really really poor (if not inexistent) and it's harder to cluster (Terracotta), there is almost nobody on the IRC channel (nobody speaks or ask questions) and the most important thing: GRAILS LOVES RAM! (~500MB of RES memory for a simple blank web site deployment..), another thing non related to grails, for system scripting, the full interpreter is really slow to start, and grails don't have access to low level API like symlinks or chmod things).. About Java itself, it have the advantages to be the language to use to extends many big softwares like Zimbra or Alfresco

What do you think about that ? Thank you

14

egervari wrote in post #913624:

Anyway, our site has to support a lot of traffic, requires a lot of cron-like stuff built into the application, and we'll need to support relational databases and something like cassandra.

Suggestions?

Here's my one suggestion. Go try Rails for yourself. If you have specific questions that you need help with then ask them here.

Asking abstract questions like these on a forum dedicated to Rails is going to get you nowhere. It's pointless really. All that will ever happen is exactly what you see here. It starts a firestorm of defensive responses and un-constructive conversation that just ends up wasting everyone's time.