Re: What is the Grails strategy to spread buzz like Rails did?

Im my opinion, Rails had a lot of luck. I don't deny the fact that
they did invent something refreshing and new (CoC) and that they wrote
a cool framework. But given the scalability problems (and other
problems: each platform has problem of its own), it always comes as a
surprise to me that *so much* buzz was generated. The amount of buzz
is clearly incredible, tons of startup are betting on RoR and tons of
jobs are out there for RoR.

In contrast, Grails buzz is quite low I agree. But on the long term
it's not clear that Grails cannot be as successful as Rails. The
problems are different though, the Java world is filled with web
frameworks and competition is tough. Some of these frameworks are of
excellent quality (going Spring 2.5 only without Grails is an
excellent choice too I believe - the excellent Java support in Eclipse
compensates the loss of dynamicity of Groovy).

What I really think is that Grails cannot be successful in the same
way as Rails. Personnally my hope is that Sun will notice Grails and
throw a lot of support behind it and Groovy. Seems unlikely however,
they wanted to profit from the Rails hype and threw resources at JRuby
instead. I believe it is / was an error though as Grails is *much*
more adapted to the Java ecosystem. Better for Sun to use its own
strengthes (the Javaecosystem has the most quality libraries, better
performance etc) than try to adapt the success of another language and
framework.

Given the current state of things, I feel the best course of action
for G2one / Grails community is to keep improving the stability and
features of the framework, and look out for possible partnerships with
interesting companies or communities. For example, a deal with Spring
source could boost Grails a lot (not sure they would agree as the
frameworks compete somewhat with each other). A deal with a company
willing to write an excellent Grails Eclipse plugin would also attract
a lot of people (not everybody wants to use JIdea - me included :)

At last, dont forget that Grails is *already* successful. Many new
installations, already stable/mature enough, excellent (and I do mean
excellent) community support, interesting features: that's a list
quite a few Java web frameworks would envy. As a startup developer
that bet my company on Grails, I dont have fears about the platform I
chose, only confidence. The only "dangerous area" I can see for Grails
is that I sometimes get the feeling that the framework is really well
known only by Graeme. In open source there is a saying that goes about
how you should avoid having parts of the code that only one guy knows
and understands fully. In Grails I feel a lot of areas are mastered
only by Graeme, which makes him absolutely vital to the health of
Grails :) Hopefully this situation will improve too however, as people
like Peter Ledbrook as hired by G2One, and we will have also maybe
have commiters coiming from the community, really knowing the
internals of Grails. Disclaimer: I dont read the Grails developer ML,
so this statement may not be completely accurate, it's just the
feeling I get for reading this ML.

Jean-Noel

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 10:25 AM, Isak Rickyanto
<isak.rickyanto@...> wrote:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this list, please visit:

    http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email