News - Grails vs Play

[CK Lee]

There is a comparison of Grails vs Play (which is based on Scala) here:

http://java.dzone.com/articles/play-vs-grails-smackdown

Here are some of the conclusions:

Code

• From a code perspective, Play 2 and Grails 2 are very similar frameworks.
• Code authoring was good in both, but lacking IDE support for Play 2's Scala Templates.
• Grails Plugin Ecosystem is excellent.
• TDD-Style Development is easy with both.
• Type-safety in Play 2 was really useful, especially routes.

 

Statistical Analysis

• Grails has better support for FEO (YSlow, PageSpeed)
• Grails has less LOC! (6 lines less, but 40% more files)
• 1 Dyno - Grails had 2x transactions!
  • Grails experienced OOM about halfway through.
• Apache Benchmark with 10K requests:
  • Play: ~10% failed requests, Grails: 0
  • Requests per second: {Play: 170, Grails: 198}
  • Requests per second: {Play: 251, Grails: 198}
• Load Test with 100 Real Users:
  • Grails: 10% more transactions, 0 errors

   

Ecosystem Analysis

• "Play" is difficult to search for.
• Grails is more mature.
• Play has momentum issues.
• LinkedIn: more people know Grails than Spring MVC.
• Play has 3x user mailing list traffic.
• We had similar experiences with documentation and questions.
• Outdated documentation is a problem for both.
• Play has way more hype!

CK

[Chee Kin Lim]

Hi CK,

Thanks for sharing. I think the name of the framework will be one of the main obstacle to push the Play framework for enterprise adoption. Just imagine when you present the IT solution to the business user ... "Our solution is implemented on top of Play framework..." 

Just my 2 cents. :)

Cheers,
Chee Kin

[Seymour Cakes]

I used Play2 few weeks back and to be honest, saying Grails and Play2 is similar is a bit far out.

Play2 sucks!   :-D

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 1:08 PM, CK Lee <ckle...@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Twitter: @seymores

[Chee Kin Lim]

Hi Seymour,

Thanks for sharing your experience. It will be great if you can spend few more seconds to share with us why it is sucks. :)

Happy weekend!

Cheers,
Chee Kin

[Seymour Cakes]

haha...

I'm going to save you guys some time with Play2 with my summary below:

1. Scala is super cool but it's not easy as Groovy. Perf is excellent but the new Groovy2 could do better, I don't know I haven't try out the new Groovy2 yet.
2. Play2 doesn't have a real ORM yet, SQL is a Good Thing in Play2 planet.
3. Play2 may not work well with Java7 on Mac OSX -- they may have fixed the bug but I'm not sure, I am too pissed to check it any further.
4. Play2 conventions is weird by Groovy standard but you may like it.

In summary of summary -- Scala is hard if all you know is Groovy, and no orm sucks.

:-)

--
Twitter: @seymores

[Chee Kin Lim]

Great! Thanks for your kindness of sharing again. I save some time. :)

Cheers,
Chee Kin

[sjtai000]

I played with Play2 (no pun intended) (Scala) recently and the first inconvenience I encountered was the support for multiple submit buttons in a form. The form is submitted to an action that we write, and we have to determine what to do by checking which button is clicked. All of the suggestions on the web are clumsy by Grails standard.

Another inconvenience is that Play2 stores the session data as cookies. From the web site:

It’s important to understand that Session and Flash data are not stored by the server but are added to each subsequent HTTP request, using the cookie mechanism. This means that the data size is very limited (up to 4 KB) and that you can only store string values.

The third annoyance is that Play2 doesn't run as a WAR file. A plugin is being worked on to generate a WAR file but it is not ready yet as of this posting. It is a big issue if the customer's Big Boss knows that his web application doesn't run in his expensive Java EE server but it runs like a command line program.

I guess if we break free from the Java EE mentality, Play2 will be a reasonably good framework. It just isn't the same Java EE stuff. Since it's different from Java EE, the Java developers will have to spend more time looking for answers & workaround to their problem.

Regards,
Tai Siew Joon