It finally came time to un-subscribe from all the Grails feeds I used to read. As I’ll no longer be doing any Grails it makes little sense to really keep up with what’s going on in the Grails world. Grails has a lot going for it, but even after over a year of doing it, it just never felt as smooth or dreamy as Rails always has. It managed to replicate some of the core that made Rails so wonderful to begin with and did a good job of it most of the time. Perhaps if I had more experience of the Spring and Hibernate core I could have got more out of the Framework, which is fine and that is on my head, but in the end it just got more and more frustrating as features available in Rails were just impossible at the time in Grails. I’m not saying that Grails is lacking, as at the end of the day, there’s nothing you can do in Rails that you can’t replicate in Grails.

In hindsight I was perhaps the wrong audience. Groovy/Grails is the perfect Java answer to Rails. I chose it to stay consistant with our other apps, so that everything ran on the same JVM and was all containted within the same application server. There were no constraints on the technologies that had to be used. Consistancy, perhaps, was the wrong reason to choose it. Maybe I should have chosen it if I had more knowledge of Spring and Hibernate. Maybe I should have chosen it if I had to to run in the same server and on the JVM. Who knows. I wish the Grails team all the best. Who knows, I may end up coming back to it one day. Stranger things have happened.