10 Reasons to Switch from Rails to Grails

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http://raincitysoftware.blogspot.com/2007/12/10-reasons-to-switch-from-rails-to.html

After spending a few years really enjoying Rails it was difficult to bring myself to even try groovy and grails. But my latest contract forced me to look for alternatives, and I'm glad I did. Here are some reasons that you may want to switch…

GORM with hibernate/spring and jpa is much better than ActiveRecord
No distribution problems; runs in many production ready containers
Internationalization out of the box (not specifically ignored as DHH does)
Transactions actually work, and they include save-points.
Not only dynamic finders and counters, but dynamic listOrderBy
No green threads (although this may be fixed in Ruby 2.0, around 2010?)
Ability to use pessimistic locking out of the box
Real-live prepared statements and .withCriteria method
Production level test reporting with built in Mocking and Stubbing
Search operations are based on Lucene (with a plugin)

All of these don't make sense for a non-java coder. And my startup time for grails would have be much longer without my prior experience with Rails and Ruby.

One thing I thought I might be giving up was the endless list of valuable gems that make developing in Rails a real pleasure. But after re-reviewing the list of open source products from apache, java source, spring, hibernate, and even Sun (glassfish), I can't think of any gems that I will miss.

documented on: December 30, 2007, by darryl.west