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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Frameworks
  5. Grails vs Play

Grails vs Play

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Grails
Grails
Stacks384
Followers373
Votes333
Play
Play
Stacks752
Followers609
Votes496
GitHub Stars12.6K
Forks4.1K

Grails vs Play: What are the differences?

What is Grails? An Open Source, full stack, web application framework for the JVM. Grails is a framework used to build web applications with the Groovy programming language. The core framework is very extensible and there are numerous plugins available that provide easy integration of add-on features.

What is Play? The High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala. Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

Grails and Play can be categorized as "Frameworks (Full Stack)" tools.

"Groovy" is the top reason why over 44 developers like Grails, while over 73 developers mention "Scala" as the leading cause for choosing Play.

Grails and Play are both open source tools. Play with 11.2K GitHub stars and 3.77K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Grails with 2.48K GitHub stars and 945 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Play has a broader approval, being mentioned in 112 company stacks & 47 developers stacks; compared to Grails, which is listed in 47 company stacks and 22 developer stacks.

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Advice on Grails, Play

Leonardo
Leonardo

Project manager and web developer at Revo Digital

Mar 22, 2021

Needs adviceonTypeScriptTypeScriptRailsRailsScalaScala

In the past few months, a project we're working on grew up quite fast. Since we're adding more and more features, I'm considering migrating my Express/TS REST API towards a more solid and more "enterprise-like" framework. Since I am experienced with TypeScript but not so much with Rails nor Play (Scala), I'd like to have some advice on which one could provide the best development experience, and most importantly, the smoothest paradigm transition from the JS/TS world. I've worked on some personal project with Rails, but I've found the Ruby language really distant from what the TypeScript ecosystem and syntax are, whereas on the opposite - during the brief tours I've taken in the past weeks - it's been a pleasure coding in Scala. Obviously, there are some key differences between the two languages - and the two frameworks consequently - but despite all the ROR automation and ease of use I don't despise at all Scala's pragmatic and great features such as static typing, pattern matching, and type inference. So... Please help me out with the choice! Regards

2.74M views2.74M
Comments
Hosam
Hosam

Senior Software Engineer

Apr 18, 2021

Review

If software performance is your top priority, then Scala/Play is probably best. If developer productivity is your top priority, then Ruby on Rails is the best choice in my opinion.

The Rails framework is batteries-included. The framework takes care of many things by default so that you don't have to. Logging, security, etc. It's also well-integrated; for example, controllers understand models out of the box. I had a better experience with RoR than with Play.

On the other hand, Scala and the JVM are more performant in general, so they can scale to serve more requests per second on the same hardware.

If you're considering serverless functions, then Scala is probably a better choice because it would be faster to load, giving you better economics.

53.4k views53.4k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Grails
Grails
Play
Play

Grails is a framework used to build web applications with the Groovy programming language. The core framework is very extensible and there are numerous plugins available that provide easy integration of add-on features.

Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

FLAT LEARNING CURVE; ON TOP OF SPRING BOOT; SMOOTH JAVA INTEGRATION; REST APIS, REACT, ANGULAR
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
12.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
4.1K
Stacks
384
Stacks
752
Followers
373
Followers
609
Votes
333
Votes
496
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 56
    Groovy
  • 40
    Jvm
  • 38
    Rapid development
  • 37
    Gorm
  • 30
    Web framework
Cons
  • 3
    Frequent breaking changes
  • 2
    Undocumented features
Pros
  • 81
    Scala
  • 55
    Web-friendly architecture
  • 55
    Built on akka
  • 50
    Stateless
  • 47
    High-scalable
Cons
  • 3
    Evolves fast, keep up with releases
  • 1
    Unnecessarily complicated
Integrations
Sublime Text
Sublime Text
IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ IDEA
Eclipse
Eclipse
Java
Java
Spring Boot
Spring Boot
React
React
TextMate
TextMate
AngularJS
AngularJS
Groovy
Groovy
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Grails, Play?

Node.js

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Android SDK

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

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