At JavaOne there was a session that is now online comparing Rails, Grails and J2EE. They say some good stuff about all three, but one can’t help but feel - unsurprisingly perhaps - that J2EE comes out smelling of roses rather unfairly.
I hope that the presenters, Damien Cooke and Tom Daly of Sun Microsystems, Inc. can get in touch with the Grails team to confirm how they ran these tests that supposedly show Grails using a huge amount of CPU compared to Rails and J2EE.
After all, we have run benchmarks that seem to be fair against Rails, and Grails throughput is much better in almost all cases. So at a basic level this cannot support the high Grails CPU usage vs Rails.
This makes me think they ran grails with “grails run-app” which runs grails in Jetty with loads of extra code to support dynamic reloading and compilation in development mode. If they did this, they should have executed “grails war” (which they know about, says it elsewhere) and run it in Tomcat/Glassfish to compare with J2EE.
There are so many typos in the document you can’t help but wonder about the quality of work involved. They call Groovy a “JavaScript” programming language. They show Grails with source code examples inline making things look complicated, and then show 4 simple bullet points for creating a CRUD J2EE application (in what universe is this?).
They say that one of the “problems” with Grails is that its made up of lots of other bits of tech - Hibernate, Spring, SiteMesh etc. Of course they would say this, but they are in denial that these are actually the best of breed APIs out there as opposed to the awful EJB, JSP, JSF gumph. They also say you have to configure all this stuff. Hmm, I think they haven’t tried convention over configuration at all.
Then there are things like “Not clear how to regenerate if you have made changes to the controller/views”. There’s nothing to do! Reload!
Pah, oh well. Damien and Tom, if you want to get in touch and give us precise details of how you did your Grails testing we’d like to help check it was a fair comparison 
Tags: Grails
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