From what I've seen of Groovy and Grails, its biggest hurdle is adoption. Why else would anyone resist using a language that improves on Java and a framework based on Rails?

Views: 99

Replies to This Discussion

Robert Dempsey said:
What I am looking for is performance comparisons of Groovy/Grails with other frameworks combined with Java such as Spring.

Hello Robert, Have you explored Scala programming? It gives you the short and flexibility of Groovy like expressiveness, but yet has good performance as close as to Java itself! Scala is static typed instead of dynamic though. Check out other post I made few days ago under Other JVM Group on this site see if you like it.
-Z
What needs to be performant and why? Things like Twitter are built on a notoriously slow platform (ie, Ruby on Rails) but it's plenty fast enough.

Grails is obviously slower than Spring MVC since it's built on old versions of Spring MVC and Spring WebFlow. Does it matter? For the vast majority of web sites the answer is trivially simple: No.

Scala is faster and slower than Java depending on what you're doing. Groovy is slower than both, but who cares? It's more than fast enough for what it's used for.

If you really need speed, write in assembly code. If you think that's not reasonable, then ask yourself why you're willing to sacrifice that speed to be able to write in Java. Then apply the same reasoning to why you would program in something like Grails.

Note that I'm not saying that you should use Grails, just that looking at performance without solid reasons *why* is well beyond foolish.
There are some performance issues (For example I have been told my IDE friendly specific typing can cause issues) that make Scala/Java better for some high volume projects. However, for simplicity and readability groovy is a better way to develop, IMHO

Jackie
To answer adoption - Grails is becoming more and more mainstream. Sky.com, Wired, and Walmart (specifically mp3.walmart.com) are some notable sites using Grails.

In benchmarking, yes, Grails is slower. But improvements are being made, both to Groovy and Grails itself.

And benchmarks are generally useless in the real world. Every application is different. Bad code, poor database design, poor technology choices, etc are going to have a far greater impact then the language used.

Where performance is an issue, you can always use Java (or Scala). In fact, much of the Grails framework is in Java, not Groovy. It all comes down to using the right tool for the job.

Also - in the age of distributed computing, I need to ask who cares if there is a 20-30% performance penalty. What does it matter if you need to spool up another VM or two in the cloud?

RSS

Happy 10th year, JCertif!

Notes

Welcome to Codetown!

Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.

When you create a profile for yourself you get a personal page automatically. That's where you can be creative and do your own thing. People who want to get to know you will click on your name or picture and…
Continue

Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.

Looking for Jobs or Staff?

Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

 

Enjoy the site? Support Codetown with your donation.



InfoQ Reading List

Researchers Attempt to Uncover the Origins of Creativity in Diffusion Models

In a recent paper, Stanford researchers Mason Kamb and Surya Ganguli proposed a mechanism that could underlie the creativity of diffusion models. The mathematical model they developed suggests that this creativity is a deterministic consequence of how those models use the denoising process to generate images.

By Sergio De Simone

Atlassian's 4 Million PostgreSQL Database Migration: When Standard Cloud Strategies Fail

Atlassian recently migrated 4 million Jira databases to Amazon Aurora, intending to reduce costs and improve the reliability of its Jira Cloud platform. Due to the large number of files involved and the constraints of managed services, the team developed a custom tool to orchestrate the process, as traditional cloud migration strategies were not viable.

By Renato Losio

LM Studio 0.3.17 Adds Model Context Protocol (MCP) Support for Tool-Integrated LLMs

LM Studio has released version 0.3.17, introducing support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — a step forward in enabling language models to access external tools and data sources. Originally developed by Anthropic, MCP defines a standardized interface for connecting LLMs to services such as GitHub, Notion, or Stripe, enabling more powerful, contextual reasoning.

By Robert Krzaczyński

Grafana Tempo 2.8 Released: Major TraceQL Enhancements and Memory Optimizations

Grafana released Tempo 2.8 on June 12, 2025, introducing substantial memory optimizations and expanded functionality in its trace query language, TraceQL. This update is part of an ongoing effort to make distributed tracing more performant and accessible within observability stacks.

By Craig Risi

Gemma 3n Introduces Novel Techniques for Enhanced Mobile AI Inference

Launched in early preview last May, Gemma 3n is now officially available. It targets mobile-first, on-device AI applications, using new techniques designed to increase efficiency and improve performance, such as per-layer embeddings and transformer nesting.

By Sergio De Simone

© 2025   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service