Grails vs Spring-Boot

Overview

Grails

Stacks384

Followers373

Votes333

Spring Boot

Stacks26.7K

Followers24.3K

Votes1.0K

GitHub Stars78.9K

Forks41.6K

Grails vs Spring Boot: What are the differences?

Grails and Spring Boot are both popular frameworks in the Java ecosystem. Let's explore the key differences between them:

Architecture: Grails is built on top of the Spring framework and follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, while Spring Boot, as the name suggests, is a standalone framework that provides an opinionated way of building Spring applications with minimal configuration.
Convention over Configuration: Grails embraces the convention over configuration principle, which means that it provides sensible default configurations that can be overridden when needed. On the other hand, Spring Boot takes a more configuration-centric approach, allowing developers to explicitly configure every aspect of their application.
Multipurpose vs Microservices: Grails is a multipurpose framework that can be used to build various types of applications, ranging from monolithic to microservices architectures. In contrast, Spring Boot is primarily designed for building microservices-based applications that can be deployed independently.
Domain-Specific Language (DSL): Grails comes with its own DSL that simplifies the creation of domain-specific functionality, such as database queries and URL mappings. Spring Boot, on the other hand, does not provide a DSL but leverages the power of the Spring framework, which offers a wide range of libraries and tools for building enterprise-grade applications.
Dependency Management: Grails uses its own build system called Gant, which is based on Apache Ant, for managing dependencies. Spring Boot, on the other hand, uses Apache Maven or Gradle as the build tool, providing a robust dependency management system that is widely adopted in the Java community.
Community and Ecosystem: Grails has a more niche community compared to Spring Boot, as it focuses on a specific set of functionalities. Spring Boot, being a part of the larger Spring ecosystem, has a vast and active community with extensive documentation, tutorials, and support.

In summary, Grails is a powerful framework for rapidly developing web applications using the Groovy programming language, with built-in features for seamless integration with Spring and Hibernate. On the other hand, Spring Boot is a framework that simplifies the setup and configuration of Spring-based applications, offering a more modular and flexible approach to building Java web applications.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Grails, Spring Boot

Eva

Fullstack developer

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Java

Spring Boot

JavaScript

Hello, I am a fullstack web developer. I have been working for a company with Java/ Spring Boot and client-side JavaScript(mainly jQuery, some AngularJS) for the past 4 years. As I wish to now work as a freelancer, I am faced with a dilemma: which stack to choose given my current knowledge and the state of the market?

I've heard PHP is very popular in the freelance world. I don't know PHP. However, I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to learn since it has many similarities with Java (OOP). It seems to me that Laravel has similarities with Spring Boot (it's MVC and OOP). Also, people say Laravel works well with Vue.js, which is my favorite JS framework.

On the other hand, I already know the Javascript language, and I like Vue.js, so I figure I could go the fullstack Javascript route with ExpressJS. However, I am not sure if these techs are ripe for freelancing (with regards to RAD, stability, reliability, security, costs, etc.) Is it true that Express is almost always used with MongoDB? Because my experience is mostly with SQL databases.

The projects I would like to work on are custom web applications/websites for small businesses. I have developed custom ERPs before and found that Java was a good fit, except for it taking a long time to develop. I cannot make a choice, and I am constantly switching between trying PHP and Node.js/Express. Any real-world advice would be welcome! I would love to find a stack that I enjoy while doing meaningful freelance coding.

826k views826k

Comments

Slimane

Jul 9, 2020

Needs adviceon

Spring Boot

NestJS

Node.js

I am currently planning to build a project from scratch. I will be using Angular as front-end framework, but for the back-end I am not sure which framework to use between Spring Boot and NestJS. I have worked with Spring Boot before, but my new project contains a lot of I/O operations, in fact it will show a daily report. I thought about the new Spring Web Reactive Framework but given the idea that Node.js is the most popular on handling non blocking I/O I am planning to start learning NestJS since it is based on Angular philosophy and TypeScript which I am familiar with. Looking forward to hear from you dear Community.

917k views917k

Comments

Anonymous

Sep 15, 2020

Needs adviceon

Kotlin

Django

I’ve been using Django for the last year on and off to do my backend API. I’m getting a bit frustrated with the Django REST framework with the setup of the serializers and Django for the lack of web sockets. I’m considering either Spring or .NET Core. I’m familiar with Kotlin and C# but I’ve not built any substantial projects with them. I like OOP, building a desktop app, web API, and also the potential to get a job in the future or building a tool at work to manage my documents, dashboard and processes point cloud data.

I’m familiar with c/cpp, TypeScript.

I would love your insights on where I should go.

617k views617k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Grails	Spring Boot
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.	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.
FLAT LEARNING CURVE; ON TOP OF SPRING BOOT; SMOOTH JAVA INTEGRATION; REST APIS, REACT, ANGULAR	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 78.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 41.6K
Stacks 384	Stacks 26.7K
Followers 373	Followers 24.3K
Votes 333	Votes 1.0K
Pros & Cons
Pros 56 Groovy 40 Jvm 38 Rapid development 37 Gorm 30 Web framework Cons 3 Frequent breaking changes 2 Undocumented features	Pros 149 Powerful and handy 134 Easy setup 128 Java 90 Spring 85 Fast Cons 23 Heavy weight 18 Annotation ceremony 13 Java 11 Many config files needed 5 Reactive
Integrations
Sublime Text IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse Java React TextMate AngularJS Groovy	Spring Java

What are some alternatives to Grails, Spring Boot?

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.

Symfony

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

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.

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 Spring Boot: What are the differences?

Grails and Spring Boot are both popular frameworks in the Java ecosystem. Let's explore the key differences between them:

Architecture: Grails is built on top of the Spring framework and follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, while Spring Boot, as the name suggests, is a standalone framework that provides an opinionated way of building Spring applications with minimal configuration.
Convention over Configuration: Grails embraces the convention over configuration principle, which means that it provides sensible default configurations that can be overridden when needed. On the other hand, Spring Boot takes a more configuration-centric approach, allowing developers to explicitly configure every aspect of their application.
Multipurpose vs Microservices: Grails is a multipurpose framework that can be used to build various types of applications, ranging from monolithic to microservices architectures. In contrast, Spring Boot is primarily designed for building microservices-based applications that can be deployed independently.
Domain-Specific Language (DSL): Grails comes with its own DSL that simplifies the creation of domain-specific functionality, such as database queries and URL mappings. Spring Boot, on the other hand, does not provide a DSL but leverages the power of the Spring framework, which offers a wide range of libraries and tools for building enterprise-grade applications.
Dependency Management: Grails uses its own build system called Gant, which is based on Apache Ant, for managing dependencies. Spring Boot, on the other hand, uses Apache Maven or Gradle as the build tool, providing a robust dependency management system that is widely adopted in the Java community.
Community and Ecosystem: Grails has a more niche community compared to Spring Boot, as it focuses on a specific set of functionalities. Spring Boot, being a part of the larger Spring ecosystem, has a vast and active community with extensive documentation, tutorials, and support.

Grails vs Spring-Boot

Overview