Grails – Tool for Agile development

“See the light - agile, industrial strength, rapid web application development made easy” – This is Spring Source’s marketing line for Grails.

For last five years I am using Groovy / Grails and with each day I am falling more in love with it. These are the few reasons Groovy / Grails is considered best for agile web application development:

Rapid development

Grails weaves so much magic around the development that development looks like a fairy tale. “Go fast” is the mantra for agile and with rapid development functionality is quickly available for testing and feedback from the users.

a. Focus on functionality rather than low level stuff – grails framework encapsulate many low level details from the developers so that they can focus on building functionality.  E.g. with a scaffolding creating a CRUD pages with pagination, sorting etc. with all the bells & whistles is 2 minutes job .

b.  Plug-in based architecture - open source plug-ins for virtually doing everything. Grails uses a plug-in based architecture and there is a vast community of plug-in developers and they are plug-ins available for most common cookie cutter functionality.  

c.  Conventions over configurations – with grails using conventions over configuration, the developers have to worry less about configuration files and this makes applications simpler and maintainable.

d. Legacy code reuse – Groovy is the language on the java platform, this make it simple to reuse legacy java codes in the grails application.

e. Dependency Resolution – Grails dependency resolution DSL helps to maintain the jars and plug-in dependencies with in Grails project. With this DSL all the dependencies can be maintained inside the grails project itself with simplicity. Grails can use either of Apache Ivy or Aether (Maven) as dependency management engine.

Quality development

a.    TDD – Grails advocates and support Test Driven Development. Its inbuilt support for the unit tests and integrations test makes test the application more often.

b.    Geb and Spock -Support of Geb and Spock tests makes testing in grails more robust , easier and faster. 

c.  Running and Testing application –   With embedded web container (Tomcat or Jetty),running and testing the grails application locally is a extremely easy and with hot deployments of the code changes the development time is quite reduced.

d.     Less code to write so less code to Review .

Robust- Build on de facto industry standards (Spring + Hibernate + Java)

a.   Groovy is a dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine and it is builds upon the strengths of Java but has additional power. Groovy makes modern programming features available to Java developers with almost-zero learning curve

b.  Grails framework is build on the top of Spring and Hibernate so it provides the features of these frameworks readily available without any extra effort.