Ruby on Rails or Groovy on Grails, Pros and Cons-Minjun Wang

Author Minjun Wang  Lead technical consultant

“RoR is an open-source web framework that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.” excerpted from rubyonrails.org. In my experience RoR is worthy of the name. Built upon a very beautiful and efficient language – Ruby, Rails has been popular for many years.

Pros:

1. Ruby language is a great language; you will love it if you try it.

2. Rails framework is quite popular and mature; you can ramp up quickly with a large amount of examples and documentation.

3. Many successful user stories including twitter.com, groupon.com etc.

4. Lots of job opportunities.

Cons:

1. Ruby is a fresh new language to many people.

2. Ruby is a dynamic language which causes some performance penalty.

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“Grails is an advanced and innovative open source web application platform that delivers new levels of developer productivity by applying principles like Convention over Configuration.” excerpted from grails.org. Grails is built on Groovy which is “the leading open source dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine that offers a flexible Java-like syntax that most Java developers can learn in matter of hours”. It sounds pretty good for the large-scale Javaers, right?

Pros:

1. Grails is built on several popular frameworks, e.g. SiteMesh, Hibernate,Spring.

2. Java programmers will have a flat learn curve, especially for those familiar with Hibernate and Spring.

3. Grails is maintained by SpringSource.com, that means the flexibility and scalability is not just good, it’s great!

4. Grails can be deployed on many popular J2EE servers, e.g. JBoss, Tomcat, WebLogic etc.

Cons:

1. Grails is quite young compared to Rails, the community and documentation is not as good as Rails.

2. Not so many job opportunities.

Suggestions:

1. If you like Java, maybe Grails is the right choice.

2. If you don’t know Java and have no plan to learn either, you can try Rails.

3. Other factors will still influence your choice, such as career opportunities, community and documentation support…