Re: FN-FORUM: AJAX frameworks - reposted

date posted 4th May 2006 10:13



Graeme J Sweeney wrote:
>
> On Thu, 4 May 2006, Jeremy Aston wrote:
>
>> Rails is v. cool but there is an alternative emerging called Grails
>> (http://grails.org). It's inspired by RoR, based on the Groovy
>
> What about Trails ...... https://trails.dev.java.net/
>
The big advantage of Rails is actually Ruby, from what I can tell Groovy
basically takes some Ruby features tacks them onto some Java features
and chucks them in a jvm scripting language while Trails looks like it's
normal Java. Java itself has a problem (in common with pretty much all
other languages in that post-C family) that you end up writing reams of
code to achieve anything. Until I started using Ruby a bit I really
hadn't paid attention to how many lines of code I have to write in C# or
Java to actually get anything done. I'm not sure about Groovy as a
language to work in, I would worry that it's no easier to learn a
partially new language than it is to learn a totally new one and I would
be a little concerned that performance of a doubly-interpreted language
would potentially be quite bad- people whinge enough about java
performance (although I've never had a problem with it) but I do I think
that adding a scripting language interpreter on top of bytecode
compilation might just be pushing your luck slightly, even with JIT,
server vms and the rest.

There is an interesting comparison of JVM scripting languages here:
http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/sokoban/

Also if you're working on smaller projects Java isn't very easy to host
either- there aren't that many places that offer JSP support on their
hosting solutions, although more than offer Rails, I'll grant.

-ben