I know and use both Ruby/Rails and Groovy/Grails and wanted to debunk a myth here:
"Interest in Grails/Groovy is diminishing" - I won't comment on trends but there is still a large, active user base and community
I won't list the benefits of Ruby/Rails over Groovy/Grails because I will assume the audience here is familiar with Ruby/Rails.
Specifically here are some benefits of Groovy over Ruby:
- Very good JVM tooling and integration
- Familiar (Java)
- Developer friendly (Ruby has a number of syntax warts, e.g. elvis operator, null safe operator - just to start) syntax
- Optional static compilation
- Optional typing
and Grails over Rails:
- Performance - take a look at techempower benchmarks http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=peak&test=query
- Spring integration - having Spring built in is often useful in an enterprise context where existing Spring use exists
- Typing is nice if you like that (Mentioned above)
When I need to decide between using Grails and Rails, it usually comes down to developer convenience vs performance. I am asking myself do I want to give up a lot of performance (with Grails) for a little more developer conveniences (with Rails)? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no.
As someone who has done a lot in both frameworks, I have found Grails to be more mature from an enterprise standpoint, and the tooling support is outstanding. IMHO, it's a lot easier to track down what is happening where in Grails as opposed to Rails.
I've also used both languages a fair bit, but I've never used Grails (although I've played with it).
Couple things to add to the pros/cons:
> Developer friendly (Ruby has a number of syntax warts, e.g. elvis operator, null safe operator - just to start) syntax
I would love to see the elvis operator and the null safe operator in Ruby, but I'd also like to see blocks in Groovy.
An addition to the pros of Groovy:
Interacts extremely well with existing Java code. While you can call into Java from JRuby, it's no where near as clean to interoperate with Java in the same code base. In the past I've loved Groovy because I could use it very cleanly inside a codebase that had a lot of Java, e.g. use Groovy to write controllers or data munging code but use Java for most other things.
Sorry to turn this into a framework war, but as someone who made the move from Groovy/Grails to Scala/Play Framework, I can't imagine ever going back. Or in other words, my answer to "A or B?" is "C".
I haven't used Groovy much, so I may be completely missing something here, but how is the elvis operator different from a simple guard in Ruby?
Based on the docs for elvis, it looks like
potentiallyFalsyValue ?: safeDefault
is exactly equivalent to
potentially_falsy_value || safe_default
in Ruby
Further, the null-safe operator seems to be the same as #try in Rails and overuse of either is probably a bit of a smell that you might be violating Tell Don't Ask
Understanding this decision requires understanding Pivotal more broadly. EMC (which owns VMWare, which owned Spring) bought Pivotal Labs (primarily a Ruby consultancy) and used the brand for a new spinoff company (Pivotal Software, Inc). That spinoff company received as its founding endowment a hodge-podge of enterprise software technologies they had acquired over the years - Spring, RabbitMQ, CloudFoundry, Greenplum - and the consultancy, which is still called Pivotal Labs. For the most part they put the Ruby consultancy people in charge.
Even though Pivotal Software is an amalgam, Pivotal received most of its culture from Pivotal Labs. To the extent that you can anthropomorphize a corporation, it really, really likes Ruby. Because of CF, it's warming up to Go fast. Spring is too big and important to neglect. But it's hard to see how Groovy/Grails fit into the big picture. It's not in vogue with the top decisionmakers and it's not critical to the business - it's just something that tagged along with Spring. I doubt anyone has any idea what to do with it.
You'd also need to understand that not all full-time Groovy and Grails developers make equal contributions. Funding the 2 technical workers on Groovy might make sense for a business, but due to ownership problems related to the brand, codebase, support, channels, and what not, disentangling these 2 workers from the whole mess is a legal nightmare. Perhaps there's something similar with Grails, but I don't know much about that one. Pivotal obviously decided simply terminating funding was more profitable than trying to split off a separate business and sell it all to someone else.
Props to what Guillaume has accomplished, but the original raison d'etre for Groovy existing has largely been supplanted by the rise of JRuby and Scala. When Groovy was initially developed JRuby was (arguably) not yet mature enough for production, so developers wanting to use Rails under the JVM were basically out of luck. Grails was developed in response to this need.
Now that JRuby is more mature (and, as of today, the only one of the two with official sponsorship) the need for Grails is greatly diminished. The only other major development effort that utilizes Groovy is Gradle, and that has been met with mixed levels of enthusiasm. Add to this that Java itself has made some strides with adding functional(-ish) features to the language, and the benefits that Groovy brings to the table are not as pronounced as they once were.
And for devs who are wanting something that is more purely functional there is Scala.
Given this I'm not particularly surprised to see Pivotal's decision here. Groovy has always struggled for more widespread relevance, and while it is sad to see this happen, it's also far from unreasonable.
> Given this I'm not particularly surprised to see Pivotal's decision here
Pivotal's decision is likely based not only on what you see, but on what else they see but you can't. They can see trends and revenues before the rest of us can, like former SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson who jumped ship over to Scala.
These are some concerns with Groovy I've blogged and commented about a lot over the past few years:
* the failure of static typing to take hold in any way. Groovy's a dynamically-typed scripting language for Grails, Gradle build scripts, and Java class manipulation. Virtually no-one uses Groovy to build systems, and even Gradle's codebase is virtually all Java. Groovy's a good scripting language for Java, like bash for Linux, and the project management should have stuck to their knitting and made it better instead of diversifying into static typing and now Android.
* their obsession with popularity rankings. Tiobe, Stack Overflow, and Github are gamed. The download numbers are fabricated. This goes far beyond what other programming language communities get up to. A year ago Groovy was number #18 in Tiobe (Oct 2003) but now they're not even in the top 50, and in April 2011, Groovy dropped from #25 to #65 in a single month, all this because of someone manipulating search engine results for some short-term marketing.
* the constant fight for control over the product. The original post is to a person's personal blog instead of one on Codehaus or Pivotal. This started happening a year ago, when that person also started soliciting for subscribers to a personal weekly mailout instead of supporting the community mailing list. No-one knows who controls the new Groovy website being promoted. One of the 5 despots in the official Codehaus despotry is trying to take over. This has been going on for the entire lifetime of Groovy when its creator was pushed out.
* the lack of documentation or any language standard designed to make people dependent on consulting and conferences. In the Groovy 1.x days, they even appeared to be changing things to shake off other independent documentation efforts or addon software like Groovy++. When the present management took over, they kept the JSR standard inactive to deliberately prevent anyone building another implementation.
I'm only talking about what happened to Groovy after its creator James Strachan left the project, not before. As for Grails, I don't know much about it except that Groovy's direction seems to be dictated by it. And Gradle seems to be on course for dropping Groovy as their sole scripting language if you read between the lines on their website.
Ruby doesn't offer one of Groovy's killer features: optional static typing.
And Scala... far too alien and complex. There was some talk out there by one of the original Scala dudes talking about how there are something like 30 different fundamental types in Scala.
Groovy offers the most accessible functional programming paradigms to Java programmers. It is a sweet spot.
I agree that there are a lot of languages that do Groovyish things, and that does make it easier to do without Groovy, but still none of them hits that sweet spot quite the way Groovy does. Groovy is still what I'd like the next version of Java to be.
I really like to know why you were downvoted, because I made the same observations you did and basically came to the same conclusion. I'd add the really bad IDE support. I've met some developers that said the only thing that kept them from leaving Groovy was that Grails and Spock are really great and worth the trouble. Other than that I see Groovy's future more as a glue language and as a language for tools. Which I'd find very unfortunate because I like Groovy's simplicity & flexibility as a JVM language.
The concurrency support with gpars is a really killer feature. I'd urge everyone to take at least just take a look at it. Extremely easy and made very "natural" with Groovy syntax. Yeah you can do concurrency with about every other language, etc. but this is within a JVM context.
I really wish we had the money to hire all the Groovy / Grails developers here. I'd do it in a heartbeat. Almost all of our products are built primarily with Groovy + Grails, and I'd hate to see the project(s) lose substantial momentum.
OTOH, I expect both projects to remain alive, even without corporate backing, although perhaps not moving quite as quickly (which would still be a loss).
Love Groovy's static+dynamic typing. I developed HiveMind (www.crudzilla.com) and the IDE backend is written entirely in Groovy primarily because I am a Java developer and could use Groovy without having to learn a new syntax.
I think the hype around Groovy was at its peak when folks were the most interested in having something like Ruby running on the JVM, and jRuby did not yet seem like a viable option. But even the hype for classic MRI Ruby has been waning, as developers look to do more with concurrency, and they discover dynamic everything-is-mutable languages have limits when it comes to concurrency. See Tony Arcieri's article "2012: The Year Rubyists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Threads (or: What Multithreaded Ruby Needs to Be Successful)" and where he wrote:
"I’m talking about at Dr. Nic’s talk at RubyConf 2011, a little more than a year ago. Dr. Nic had a fairly simple message: when performance matters, build multithreaded programs on JRuby (also: stop using EventMachine). Now granted he was working the company that was subsidizing JRuby development at the time, but I didn’t, and I for one strongly agreed with him. Not many other people in the room did. The talk seemed to be met with a lot of incredulity."
So even among Rubyists, there has been growing interest in Ruby beyond the MRI, and if that is happening in the land of Ruby, then the argument for Groovy is that much weaker.
At the same time, the growing interest in dealing with concurrency certainly helped increase interest in Scala and Clojure, and furthermore, functional programming in general. If you are a developer who wants to harness the power of concurrency for greater speed, Scala and (especially) Clojure are full of interesting ideas for how to do that. Groovy, meanwhile, feels off-topic.
It might be for the best. I heard that the VMWare people are a bit scuzzy and unethical, such as slapping legal threats on authors to take over their github projects. Of course that was from what I thought was a drama queen ex-groovy committer, but now he looks much more sane.
Pivotal is trying to push vert.x now, which I think is a node.js for JVM type of thing.
Since they never did make an awesome configure-spring-with-groovy conversion, I guess this won't be too painful of a split.
Groovy was the #1 JVM language besides Java for quite a while, I think it still is despite Clojure/Scala hype. It was before pivotal took it on, and it probably will be fine.
It's feature set is actually fairly stable. It doesn't need to do Java lambdas, since it has its own, so no major Java cross compatibilities to port from Java8.
Gradle is heaven for anyone who's ever had to work with Ant in earnest. The programming language is actually a language, not a horrifying accidentally-Turing-complete DSL!
I hope they can find a model like how Django (Python) has its own foundation to support it. With Gradle being defacto build tool for Android ecosystem and companies like Netflix using it, it feels like they would have no problem with finding a new home/raising-fund for future.
I have been using Groovy and Grails for less than a year now and love it so far.
I like Groovy. The language has the ability to made some very, very nice DSLs (almost english-like).
But the buzz around Groovy has diminished. There's only so much room for the already crowded JVM ecosystem. It's great to have choice, but there's only X number of developers, X number of companies that can sponsor, X number of users that build a community.
I'd like to see a language like Groovy, but with some of the semantics of Clojure, and some optional typing. Maybe it's time for a reboot of the language.
[+] [-] bjfish|11 years ago|reply
"Interest in Grails/Groovy is diminishing" - I won't comment on trends but there is still a large, active user base and community
I won't list the benefits of Ruby/Rails over Groovy/Grails because I will assume the audience here is familiar with Ruby/Rails.
Specifically here are some benefits of Groovy over Ruby:
and Grails over Rails: When I need to decide between using Grails and Rails, it usually comes down to developer convenience vs performance. I am asking myself do I want to give up a lot of performance (with Grails) for a little more developer conveniences (with Rails)? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no.[+] [-] rufugee|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbell|11 years ago|reply
Couple things to add to the pros/cons:
> Developer friendly (Ruby has a number of syntax warts, e.g. elvis operator, null safe operator - just to start) syntax
I would love to see the elvis operator and the null safe operator in Ruby, but I'd also like to see blocks in Groovy.
An addition to the pros of Groovy:
Interacts extremely well with existing Java code. While you can call into Java from JRuby, it's no where near as clean to interoperate with Java in the same code base. In the past I've loved Groovy because I could use it very cleanly inside a codebase that had a lot of Java, e.g. use Groovy to write controllers or data munging code but use Java for most other things.
[+] [-] thoman23|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prophetjohn|11 years ago|reply
Based on the docs for elvis, it looks like
is exactly equivalent to in RubyFurther, the null-safe operator seems to be the same as #try in Rails and overuse of either is probably a bit of a smell that you might be violating Tell Don't Ask
[+] [-] stickfigure|11 years ago|reply
Even though Pivotal Software is an amalgam, Pivotal received most of its culture from Pivotal Labs. To the extent that you can anthropomorphize a corporation, it really, really likes Ruby. Because of CF, it's warming up to Go fast. Spring is too big and important to neglect. But it's hard to see how Groovy/Grails fit into the big picture. It's not in vogue with the top decisionmakers and it's not critical to the business - it's just something that tagged along with Spring. I doubt anyone has any idea what to do with it.
[+] [-] vorg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revscat|11 years ago|reply
Now that JRuby is more mature (and, as of today, the only one of the two with official sponsorship) the need for Grails is greatly diminished. The only other major development effort that utilizes Groovy is Gradle, and that has been met with mixed levels of enthusiasm. Add to this that Java itself has made some strides with adding functional(-ish) features to the language, and the benefits that Groovy brings to the table are not as pronounced as they once were.
And for devs who are wanting something that is more purely functional there is Scala.
Given this I'm not particularly surprised to see Pivotal's decision here. Groovy has always struggled for more widespread relevance, and while it is sad to see this happen, it's also far from unreasonable.
[+] [-] vorg|11 years ago|reply
Pivotal's decision is likely based not only on what you see, but on what else they see but you can't. They can see trends and revenues before the rest of us can, like former SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson who jumped ship over to Scala.
These are some concerns with Groovy I've blogged and commented about a lot over the past few years:
* the failure of static typing to take hold in any way. Groovy's a dynamically-typed scripting language for Grails, Gradle build scripts, and Java class manipulation. Virtually no-one uses Groovy to build systems, and even Gradle's codebase is virtually all Java. Groovy's a good scripting language for Java, like bash for Linux, and the project management should have stuck to their knitting and made it better instead of diversifying into static typing and now Android.
* their obsession with popularity rankings. Tiobe, Stack Overflow, and Github are gamed. The download numbers are fabricated. This goes far beyond what other programming language communities get up to. A year ago Groovy was number #18 in Tiobe (Oct 2003) but now they're not even in the top 50, and in April 2011, Groovy dropped from #25 to #65 in a single month, all this because of someone manipulating search engine results for some short-term marketing.
* the constant fight for control over the product. The original post is to a person's personal blog instead of one on Codehaus or Pivotal. This started happening a year ago, when that person also started soliciting for subscribers to a personal weekly mailout instead of supporting the community mailing list. No-one knows who controls the new Groovy website being promoted. One of the 5 despots in the official Codehaus despotry is trying to take over. This has been going on for the entire lifetime of Groovy when its creator was pushed out.
* the lack of documentation or any language standard designed to make people dependent on consulting and conferences. In the Groovy 1.x days, they even appeared to be changing things to shake off other independent documentation efforts or addon software like Groovy++. When the present management took over, they kept the JSR standard inactive to deliberately prevent anyone building another implementation.
I'm only talking about what happened to Groovy after its creator James Strachan left the project, not before. As for Grails, I don't know much about it except that Groovy's direction seems to be dictated by it. And Gradle seems to be on course for dropping Groovy as their sole scripting language if you read between the lines on their website.
[+] [-] cowardlydragon|11 years ago|reply
Ruby doesn't offer one of Groovy's killer features: optional static typing.
And Scala... far too alien and complex. There was some talk out there by one of the original Scala dudes talking about how there are something like 30 different fundamental types in Scala.
Groovy offers the most accessible functional programming paradigms to Java programmers. It is a sweet spot.
[+] [-] mcv|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emsy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derpshmerp|11 years ago|reply
It provides fantastic support for concurrency with gpars.
It provides the ability to write static or dynamic code.
It integrates seamlessly with Java.
I feel groovy has created it's own space in the ecosystem, continues to grow and has a bright future.
[+] [-] laichzeit0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrime|11 years ago|reply
OTOH, I expect both projects to remain alive, even without corporate backing, although perhaps not moving quite as quickly (which would still be a loss).
[+] [-] Edmond|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|11 years ago|reply
Good luck for the business.
[+] [-] bonsai80|11 years ago|reply
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tVxs2fJ...
[+] [-] j_s|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|11 years ago|reply
Seems its hype has been eclipsed by Clojure and Scala.
[+] [-] lisa_henderson|11 years ago|reply
"I’m talking about at Dr. Nic’s talk at RubyConf 2011, a little more than a year ago. Dr. Nic had a fairly simple message: when performance matters, build multithreaded programs on JRuby (also: stop using EventMachine). Now granted he was working the company that was subsidizing JRuby development at the time, but I didn’t, and I for one strongly agreed with him. Not many other people in the room did. The talk seemed to be met with a lot of incredulity."
So even among Rubyists, there has been growing interest in Ruby beyond the MRI, and if that is happening in the land of Ruby, then the argument for Groovy is that much weaker.
At the same time, the growing interest in dealing with concurrency certainly helped increase interest in Scala and Clojure, and furthermore, functional programming in general. If you are a developer who wants to harness the power of concurrency for greater speed, Scala and (especially) Clojure are full of interesting ideas for how to do that. Groovy, meanwhile, feels off-topic.
[+] [-] adam77|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pmf_|11 years ago|reply
I often wish it had gained more momentum before Clojure and Scala showed up.
The Java interoperation is much, much cleaner than in Jython or JRuby due to Groovy being a first class JVM language.
[+] [-] tree_of_item|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowardlydragon|11 years ago|reply
Pivotal is trying to push vert.x now, which I think is a node.js for JVM type of thing.
Since they never did make an awesome configure-spring-with-groovy conversion, I guess this won't be too painful of a split.
Groovy was the #1 JVM language besides Java for quite a while, I think it still is despite Clojure/Scala hype. It was before pivotal took it on, and it probably will be fine.
It's feature set is actually fairly stable. It doesn't need to do Java lambdas, since it has its own, so no major Java cross compatibilities to port from Java8.
[+] [-] pron|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidgerard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidgerard|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ireadzalot|11 years ago|reply
I have been using Groovy and Grails for less than a year now and love it so far.
[+] [-] mikerichards|11 years ago|reply
But the buzz around Groovy has diminished. There's only so much room for the already crowded JVM ecosystem. It's great to have choice, but there's only X number of developers, X number of companies that can sponsor, X number of users that build a community.
I'd like to see a language like Groovy, but with some of the semantics of Clojure, and some optional typing. Maybe it's time for a reboot of the language.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mentaat|11 years ago|reply
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