Very clear and level-headed reasoning Alex. Would you like to, or would you mind if I put it up as a blog post on tynamo.org?
Kalle On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 8:30 PM, Alex Kotchnev <akoch...@gmail.com> wrote: > In the past five years, I worked on a number of greenfield projects. In > three out of four, we ended up choosing Grails - it is very hard to deny > the market & mindshare , the expansive documentation, the big name company > behind the project, the large community, a massive number of plugins (for > pretty much anything that you'd want), the end-to-end stack (so, you don't > have to choose your ORM, DI, etc) and the ease of getting started with a > Grails project. > > However, after working on a couple of these Grails projects for a few > years, the latest project I got involved with , I chose Tapestry. In some > cases, I've missed some of the niceties that Grails brings out of the box, > but without too much effort I've been able to replicate them fairly easily. > > The biggest reasons for picking Tapestry over Grails on this latest project > have been: > 1. The inability to aggressively refactor your code - the dynamic nature of > the language is nice when you want to knock something out quickly, and > saves you a few lines of code here and there. However, after the codebase > gets to a certain size, the inability to reliably refactor the codebase > made the codebase difficult to evolve. Sure, IntelliJ & NetBeans has some > support for refactorings in Groovy; however, it is not even close to the > level of depth and ease of what you get with Java. I love Groovy to death, > have been using it for many years (since it was in jsr-1 version) but ... > the tool support is just not there yet (and likely will never be) and for a > team of developers Java just ends up being a better choice (at least in the > context of my team) > > 2. The importance of Tapestry components cannot be overstated. In a fairly > modern web app, the functionality of each page depends on a bunch of > markup, some CSS from a stylesheet, and some javascript from a javascript > file. Tapestry makes putting everything together and using the results > extremely easy and logical. In the late days of the last Grails project I > was involved in, it was a massive PITA to build a page that really should > have looked like 'that other one' - even when you used tag libraries to > encapsulate the markup generation, you still had to hunt down all the css > and js files that needed to be there. > > On the first issue, if you will be using Groovy for your pages, you will be > in the same boat as Grails. Personally, I wouldn't recommend it - Tapestry > already pushes the envelope on Java quite a bit, so your Java code ends up > being very short and sweet already. In the past, I had attempted to use > Scala in a tapestry app, and ended up having to just deal w/ some of the > mismatches between the language and the framework and my pages ended up > looking up like the same old java pages I would have had but with a > different syntax. > > On the second issue, there is the grails resources plugin that tries to > pull resources kinda like Tapestry, but using it requires this artificial > separation into resource bundles which seems to be a PITA and somewhat mind > bending. > > On the abundance of Grails plugins - after using a bunch for the projects I > was working on, it turned out that many were not well maintained so we had > to take over and maintain them ourselves. Sometimes, they're a good > starting point, but in the end ended up less of a factor than I initially > thought. > > I originally very much enjoyed the Grails build system (running on top of > Gradle); however, with a pretty simple project setup, Maven seems to be > just as straightforward. If you wanted Gradle, you could use that for your > Tapestry app, and be on-par w/ Grails. > > On the latest project that I chose Tapestry for , I have been very happy > with my choice. On a few occasions I've run into some frustrations (e.g. > for rendering emails, I ended up having to use Freemarker, whereas with > Grails the template rendering for emails comes for 'free' ; I had to build > my own equivalent of the Grails "console" plugin where you can run Groovy > commands inside of your running application); however, in all cases, the > solution has turned out to be more elegant than I had expected (albeit, it > required deeper tweaks in the framework than I had expected). > > Cheers, > > Alex Kochnev > > On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Thiago H de Paula Figueiredo < > thiag...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I haven't used Groovy myself, but it seems Tapestry and it work very well >> for a long time. I've found a post by Howard Lewis Ship about this >> combination in Tapestry 5.0.12, which was an alpha version, all that in >> 2008: http://tapestryjava.blogspot.**com.br/2008/06/tapestry-with-** >> groovy.html<http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com.br/2008/06/tapestry-with-groovy.html>. >> Tapestry doesn't case about the language you use, as long as it generates >> .class files and you put them in the right places. Some people has used >> Tapestry with Scala too. >> >> >> On Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:39:16 -0300, scrotty <scro...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I am about to create a brand new website. I plan on using Groovy for my >>> JVM >>> language (just an arbitrary constraint I imposed on myself as part of the >>> polyglot experience) and would like to give my users the niceties of AJAX >>> on >>> the front end. Everything else: DB, ORM, Web framework, etc. are wide >>> open. >>> >>> I am not new to development in general nor web development in particular. >>> I >>> have development experience in all the layers typically used in a web >>> application (from browser to DB). I am looking for technologies that will >>> allow me to create and maintain a straight-forward web application while >>> minimizing the "gotchas" that naturally occur when gluing each layer >>> together. >>> >>> For web framework I've narrowed my candidates down to Grails and Tapestry >>> and am leaning toward Tapestry. But it's hard for me to ignore the Groovy >>> synergy in Grails. >>> >>> Does anyone have recommendations (especially - but not exclusively - if >>> you've used Groovy with Tapestry) on which field I should plant my seeds >>> in? >>> >>> Thank You! >>> Sean >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> View this message in context: http://tapestry.1045711.n5.** >>> nabble.com/Greenfield-**development-Tapestry-or-**Grails-for-Groovy-dev-* >>> *tp5716732.html<http://tapestry.1045711.n5.nabble.com/Greenfield-development-Tapestry-or-Grails-for-Groovy-dev-tp5716732.html> >>> Sent from the Tapestry - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. >>> >>> ------------------------------**------------------------------**--------- >>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: >>> users-unsubscribe@tapestry.**apache.org<users-unsubscr...@tapestry.apache.org> >>> For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tapestry.apache.org >>> >>> >> >> -- >> Thiago H. de Paula Figueiredo >> >> >> ------------------------------**------------------------------**--------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: >> users-unsubscribe@tapestry.**apache.org<users-unsubscr...@tapestry.apache.org> >> For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tapestry.apache.org >> >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tapestry.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tapestry.apache.org
