Grails, Groovy, & some other stuff

As the name suggests WebDevRadio is a web development podcast. I'm a big fan of this show. It always delivers an interesting perspective, and the discussions often relate to a technology I'm also exploring.

In a recent episode, the host Michael Kimsal interviewed Jason Rudolph about Jason's new book Getting Started with Grails. I've written before about Ruby and Rails and using something like JRuby to leverage Java's stability and scalability in a production environment. Grails (and Groovy) is an interesting alternative to the Rails/Ruby/JRuby I'd been thinking about. Like Ruby, Groovy is an interpreted language but with some constructs that make it easier for Java developers to transition over. Also, since it's written for the JVM, it gets all the Java maturity "for free" and naturally integrates with existing Java modules (No need for something like JRuby).

Grails brings the Rails goodness to the Groovy platform... including a lot of the tools (scaffolding, included persistence layer, etc.) and concepts (convention over configuration) that make it easy to quickly get something up and running in Rails. I'm going to spend some more time checking it out.

This was a great conversation. They also touched on:
  • No Fluff, Just Stuff. These sound like great conferences to learn and explore new and cutting edge ideas and technology
  • Streamlined Framework. This framework adds some productivity enhancements to Rails and ActiveRecord.
  • Solr. As I understand it, Solr adds a web service front-end to Lucene. I had done some previous work with Lucene and this podcast series had introduced me to Solar. Should I ever need to revisit that work, I'm going to keep this project in mind.

Comments

Jason Rudolph said…
Hi Vincent,
I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the podcast. I'd like to offer one small clarification to your post if I may. While Groovy offers the interactivity of an interpreted language, all code is actually compiled prior to execution. The nice part, of course, is that the compilation happens automatically, with no extra effort required on the part of the developer.

All the best,
Jason
October 13, 2007 at 1:39 PM
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