Category: General

Few weeks ago I started learning Grails framework.

For me this is new world but it smells like Symfony sometimes – almost the same approaches with domain (Symfony: model) management, CRUD generator (Symfony: Admin generator) here excites as much as in Symfony.

“Leaving” PHP world for Groovy-Grails-Java was quite hard on start and I still stuck in researches. But I have smart enough guru in the stretched hand distance, please let me introduce Alex, The Grails Guru.

If you are Symfony developer you’d love this framework. You’ll see there similar things you’ve used to use in Symfony:

• mvc: domain classes + controller classes + view in GSP pages
• routing: you can define any route rule in a special routing construction
• configuration: there no any YAML configuration files but .properties files instead
• partials: are also present in Grails like includes
• and so on, I can’t remember on a spot. I’ll be adding this list with new features.

BUT started developing Grails applications you’ll get all Java development advantages:

• Continuous integration development
• Maven 2, dependencies management (management of so many libraries becomes easiest task)
• Reliable, useful  and fast IDE IntelliJ IDEA (you can try it for 30 days)
• Professional TDD (saying the truth, not all PHP developers using it, but in Java world things become better)

On other hand you can try work with Grails on Ubuntu Linux, it is faster then Windows machines.

I’ll be posting my achievements and research results here while learning this amazing tool.