There is no doubt the entire global economy has fallen on tough times. Individuals and businesses are struggling to keep their heads above water. It’s these types of economic conditions that spur change within corporations when the status quo just doesn't cut it anymore. Where does Grails fit into this?

For many years, businesses have had it pretty easy and so has IT. Large sums of money have been thrown at buzz word friendly ‘enterprise solutions’ that provide ‘synergy’, a ‘global’ presence, and an overall ‘paradigm’ shift in how we think about ‘cloud’ based solutions.

Now that reality is setting in, companies are looking for less expensive alternatives. Grails is able to provide solutions in the following ways:

Open Source Stack = $0

Because Grails runs on the JVM, it is platform agnostic and capable of running on top of a 100% open source stack. Everything including the OS, app server, and database may be obtained free of charge with no license fees.

Faster Development Time

Yes, it’s great that everything needed to run Grails’ applications may be obtained for free, but what’s even a bigger cost savings is how much time developers can save by working within the Groovy/Grails environment. Grails really tends to speed up development in the following 3 areas:

Data Access

GORM provides an amazingly efficient way to model domain objects as well as persist them to a database. GORM, in my opinion, is the star of the Grails framework. It’s what sets Grails apart from many other frameworks including Ruby on Rails.

Scaffolding

Scaffolding was a brilliant idea popularized by another great framework, Ruby on Rails. Scaffolding allows for the dynamic generation of admin pages. It works quite well and I’ve found that the use of scaffolding is responsible for a large increase in my own productivity.

Syntax

When working with Groovy and Grails, developers will find themselves writing less code than when working within the traditional Java environment. Less code translates into shorter development time.  Scott Hickey wrote a fantastic article that provides a breakdown of the Java and Groovy syntax differences along with examples.  You may read it here.

Summary

Grails is a great fit for a recession. It allows developers to create high quality applications on top of a free open source stack in less time than many of the more common, corporate frameworks. I’ve been fortunate enough to see these productivity gains firsthand. I hope you’ll be lucky enough to experience them too!