Grails vs Symfony

Overview

Grails

Stacks384

Followers373

Votes333

Symfony

Stacks8.5K

Followers6.2K

Votes1.1K

GitHub Stars30.7K

Forks9.7K

Grails vs Symfony: What are the differences?

Language: Grails utilizes the Groovy programming language, which is a dynamic language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. Symfony, on the other hand, is built using PHP, a widely-used scripting language for web development.
Ecosystem: Grails benefits from the rich Java ecosystem, access to Java libraries, and tools, while Symfony has a large and active PHP community with a vast array of ready-to-use bundles and components available for rapid development.
Performance: Symfony is known for its performance optimization capabilities, with features like bytecode caching and opcode caching for improved speed. Grails, on the other hand, may have slower performance due to the dynamic nature of Groovy and its reliance on the JVM.
Code Generation: Grails provides powerful code generation capabilities, allowing developers to quickly scaffold applications and generate CRUD interfaces for database entities. Symfony, on the other hand, focuses more on manual configuration and customization, which can be beneficial for fine-tuning applications.
Testing: Grails promotes test-driven development with its built-in testing features and support for tools like Spock and Geb. Symfony also emphasizes testing with PHPUnit and Behat, offering robust testing frameworks for ensuring code quality and reliability.
Community and Support: Symfony boasts a large and active community that provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and support forums. Grails, although growing, may not have as large of a community or as many resources available for developers seeking help and guidance.

In Summary, Grails and Symfony differ in terms of the programming language they are based on, their ecosystem, performance, code generation capabilities, testing features, and community support.

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Advice on Grails, Symfony

Danilo

Senior Software Engineer at WeRoad

Dec 14, 2021

Decided

For a full-stack app or just simple APIs I'd go 100% with Laravel. You get a clean architecture, beautiful documentation and friendly and always growing community: the project is yours, from A to Z. With their docs and resources like Laracast you can start from zero and build what you want, when you want. The learning curve is definitely smaller when compared to Symfony and, with the help of a bit of "magic" (Facades etc.) you get the same results in the half of the time with cleaner code.

105k views105k

Comments

Quade

DevOps Engineer

Jun 27, 2022

Needs adviceon

Django

Python

Symfony

Hi everyone! I'm starting a personal project that I've been postponing for a little while and I need a bit of advice. I thought that it will be a bit of a challenge but I figure the best way to learn is by doing!

The plan is to build an app with loads of automation build in for reporting which would make it very easy to perform tasks, The plan is to build something similar to an HR app using microservice architecture, separating services e.g. employee data, payroll (including calculations based on easily entered info like tax %), employee services (vacation, sick day allowance booking and tabulation) and automated reporting on a pre-defined schedule (bi-weekly, monthly).

I am considering Django (as I currently know a bit of Python) and Symfony (as a friend who is a developer recommended it) but I am well aware there are other (and probably better) tools out there for the job (like maybe ExpressJS/Node.js for the backend and React/Vue.js for the front).

Background:

I have got knowledge as a DevOps, Site Reliability and Cloud engineer so once the app is built I'm very comfortable taking it to deployment.

Thank you all for your help and responses.

72.4k views72.4k

Comments

Fabian

May 5, 2020

Needs adviceon

GraphQL

C++

Symfony

I'm about to begin working on an API, for which I plan to add GraphQL connectivity for processing data. The data processed will mainly be audio files being downloaded/uploaded with some user messaging & authentication.

I don't mind the difficulty in any service since I've used C++ (for data structures & algorithms at least) and would also say I am patient and can learn fairly quickly. My main concerns would be their performance, libraries/community, and job marketability.

Why I'm stuck between these three...

Symfony: I've programmed in PHP for back-end in a previous internship and may do so again in a few months.

Node.js: It's newer than PHP, and it's JavaScript where my front-end stack will be React and (likely) React Native.

Golang: It's newer than PHP, I've heard of its good performance, and it would be nice to learn a new (growing) language.

2.4M views2.4M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Grails	Symfony
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.	It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..
FLAT LEARNING CURVE; ON TOP OF SPRING BOOT; SMOOTH JAVA INTEGRATION; REST APIS, REACT, ANGULAR	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 30.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 9.7K
Stacks 384	Stacks 8.5K
Followers 373	Followers 6.2K
Votes 333	Votes 1.1K
Pros & Cons
Pros 56 Groovy 40 Jvm 38 Rapid development 37 Gorm 30 Web framework Cons 3 Frequent breaking changes 2 Undocumented features	Pros 177 Open source 149 Php 130 Community 129 Dependency injection 122 Professional Cons 10 Too many dependency 8 Lot of config files 4 YMAL 3 Feature creep 1 Bloated
Integrations
Sublime Text IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse Java Spring Boot React TextMate AngularJS Groovy	CakePHP PHP ReactPHP

What are some alternatives to Grails, Symfony?

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

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 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

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.

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

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix is a framework for building HTML5 apps, API backends and distributed systems. Written in Elixir, you get beautiful syntax, productive tooling and a fast runtime.

Related Comparisons

Grails vs Symfony: What are the differences?

Language: Grails utilizes the Groovy programming language, which is a dynamic language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. Symfony, on the other hand, is built using PHP, a widely-used scripting language for web development.
Ecosystem: Grails benefits from the rich Java ecosystem, access to Java libraries, and tools, while Symfony has a large and active PHP community with a vast array of ready-to-use bundles and components available for rapid development.
Performance: Symfony is known for its performance optimization capabilities, with features like bytecode caching and opcode caching for improved speed. Grails, on the other hand, may have slower performance due to the dynamic nature of Groovy and its reliance on the JVM.
Code Generation: Grails provides powerful code generation capabilities, allowing developers to quickly scaffold applications and generate CRUD interfaces for database entities. Symfony, on the other hand, focuses more on manual configuration and customization, which can be beneficial for fine-tuning applications.
Testing: Grails promotes test-driven development with its built-in testing features and support for tools like Spock and Geb. Symfony also emphasizes testing with PHPUnit and Behat, offering robust testing frameworks for ensuring code quality and reliability.
Community and Support: Symfony boasts a large and active community that provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and support forums. Grails, although growing, may not have as large of a community or as many resources available for developers seeking help and guidance.

In Summary, Grails and Symfony differ in terms of the programming language they are based on, their ecosystem, performance, code generation capabilities, testing features, and community support.

Grails vs Symfony

Overview