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Grails

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Grails vs Play: What are the differences?

What is Grails? An Open Source, full stack, web application framework for the JVM. Grails is a framework used to build web applications with the Groovy programming language. The core framework is very extensible and there are numerous plugins available that provide easy integration of add-on features.

What is Play? The High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala. Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

Grails and Play can be categorized as "Frameworks (Full Stack)" tools.

"Groovy" is the top reason why over 44 developers like Grails, while over 73 developers mention "Scala" as the leading cause for choosing Play.

Grails and Play are both open source tools. Play with 11.2K GitHub stars and 3.77K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Grails with 2.48K GitHub stars and 945 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Play has a broader approval, being mentioned in 112 company stacks & 47 developers stacks; compared to Grails, which is listed in 47 company stacks and 22 developer stacks.

Advice on Grails and Play
Leonardo Viada
Project manager and web developer at Revo Digital · | 4 upvotes · 2.7M views
Needs advice
on
PlayPlayRailsRails
and
ScalaScala
at

In the past few months, a project we're working on grew up quite fast. Since we're adding more and more features, I'm considering migrating my Express/TS REST API towards a more solid and more "enterprise-like" framework. Since I am experienced with TypeScript but not so much with Rails nor Play (Scala), I'd like to have some advice on which one could provide the best development experience, and most importantly, the smoothest paradigm transition from the JS/TS world. I've worked on some personal project with Rails, but I've found the Ruby language really distant from what the TypeScript ecosystem and syntax are, whereas on the opposite - during the brief tours I've taken in the past weeks - it's been a pleasure coding in Scala. Obviously, there are some key differences between the two languages - and the two frameworks consequently - but despite all the ROR automation and ease of use I don't despise at all Scala's pragmatic and great features such as static typing, pattern matching, and type inference. So... Please help me out with the choice! Regards

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Replies (4)
Kevin Emery
QE Systems Engineer at Discovery, Inc. · | 6 upvotes · 54.6K views
Recommends
on
RailsRails

I don't have the Scala experience to compare the two, but I can say that Ruby is a wonderful language. For procedural programming where you don't need a lot of concurrent execution threads, it's superior to Node.JS in my opinion. All of the concepts from Typescript have equivalent syntax in Ruby, but there are fewer symbols (e.g. () => { ... }); ) and more keywords (eg 'do ... end'). It's a very flexible language and allows for a lot of different approaches to how it's written, so coding standards and careful organization is important. In the long run, however, you'll find it quicker to debug than Node.JS and just as powerful.

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ALESSIO SALTARIN
Distinguished IT Architect at IBM · | 5 upvotes · 55.4K views

If you are comfortable with TypeScript, why not evolve to a C# ecosystem? Asp.Net Core + Entity Framework is a mature and well supported technology. As far as I can see in the enterprise market, the most adopted choice is still Java. So, maybe you may have a look to SpringBoot - and ultimately Quarkus.

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Hosam Aly
Senior Software Engineer · | 3 upvotes · 46.8K views
Recommends
on
PlayPlayRailsRailsScalaScala

If software performance is your top priority, then Scala/Play is probably best. If developer productivity is your top priority, then Ruby on Rails is the best choice in my opinion.

The Rails framework is batteries-included. The framework takes care of many things by default so that you don't have to. Logging, security, etc. It's also well-integrated; for example, controllers understand models out of the box. I had a better experience with RoR than with Play.

On the other hand, Scala and the JVM are more performant in general, so they can scale to serve more requests per second on the same hardware.

If you're considering serverless functions, then Scala is probably a better choice because it would be faster to load, giving you better economics.

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Reza Malek
at Meam Software Engineering Group · | 3 upvotes · 46.8K views
Recommends
on
RailsRailsScalaScala

This is advice regardless of your background and requirements. The Play framework has a terrible and complicated design, don't risk it. I even suggest Spring and Kotlin over it! You can use Scala for small services and Data Engineering stuff and benefit optimizations and threading of JVM. RoR, on the other hand, has a huge development speed, which I believe is a big advantage cause you can handle performance bottlenecks later. Also, Scala has another downside, which is featureful in terms of OO and FP paradigms, which makes anyone write code freely with any personal style and makes it a problem in a team, Hence a coding style has to be defined if there would be Scala development team.

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Pros of Grails
Pros of Play
  • 56
    Groovy
  • 40
    Jvm
  • 38
    Rapid development
  • 37
    Gorm
  • 30
    Web framework
  • 25
    Open source
  • 21
    Plugins
  • 17
    Extensible
  • 17
    Easy
  • 14
    Dynamic
  • 6
    Clean architecture (Dependency Injection)
  • 6
    Gradle
  • 5
    Clear what everything does, lots of options
  • 4
    RAD
  • 4
    Agile
  • 4
    Great documentation
  • 3
    Android
  • 3
    Spring
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 1
    Java web apps with steroid
  • 81
    Scala
  • 55
    Web-friendly architecture
  • 55
    Built on akka
  • 50
    Stateless
  • 47
    High-scalable
  • 46
    Fast
  • 40
    Open source
  • 34
    Java
  • 27
    High velocity
  • 24
    Fun
  • 9
    Lightweight
  • 8
    Non-blocking io
  • 6
    Developer friendly
  • 5
    Simple template engine
  • 4
    Scalability
  • 3
    Pure love
  • 2
    Resource efficient

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Cons of Grails
Cons of Play
  • 3
    Frequent breaking changes
  • 2
    Undocumented features
  • 3
    Evolves fast, keep up with releases
  • 1
    Unnecessarily complicated

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What is Grails?

Grails is a framework used to build web applications with the Groovy programming language. The core framework is very extensible and there are numerous plugins available that provide easy integration of add-on features.

What is Play?

Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

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What companies use Grails?
What companies use Play?
See which teams inside your own company are using Grails or Play.
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What tools integrate with Grails?
What tools integrate with Play?

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What are some alternatives to Grails and Play?
Rails
Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.
Groovy
It is a powerful multi-faceted programming language for the JVM platform. It supports a spectrum of programming styles incorporating features from dynamic languages such as optional and duck typing, but also static compilation and static type checking at levels similar to or greater than Java through its extensible static type checker. It aims to greatly increase developer productivity with many powerful features but also a concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax.
Spring Boot
Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.
Spring
A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.
Java
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!
See all alternatives