title: Is Grails worth it?
body: <p>This is half rant, half question.</p>
  
  <p>Is it worth using Grails? I'm trying to develop a relatively simple database-driven web application. My expertise is in Java, so naturally Grails seemed like a good choice. At first I thought of using Spring, JPA and Hibernate, but I’ve used that previously and have run into all sorts of tedious configuration and coding work. Grails advertises itself as solving this.</p>
  
  <p>My biggest frustration with Grails is all of the little things that don't work. What I mean is that it doesn't work as one would intuitively think it should. It's very rough around the edges. I run into problems constantly. Sometimes it's my lack of Grails understanding — other times I've discovered legitimate Grails bugs.</p>
  
  <p>One major issue is the lack of good Eclipse integration. There is a Groovy and Grails plugin, but it doesn't do much other than syntax highlighting. Calling Groovy from Java and vice versa is very painful to <a href="http://brainflush.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/grails-and-eclipse-not-so-groovy/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">configure</a>. Not having good IDE support is a major bummer.</p>
  
  <p>What happens is I sit down trying to develop my web application. At the end of the day I realize that I've spent about 85% of the day debugging Grails-related issues. If it isn't Eclipse problems then it's <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/397145/grails-eager-fetch-doesnt-retrieve-all-data">eager loading</a>, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/396703/how-to-reference-a-grails-domain-class-fields-from-outside-of-the-grails-contro">fetching in the view</a>, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/396667/in-grails-need-to-define-a-set-for-one-to-many-relationship">one-to-many relationships</a>, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/396514/after-grails-clean-i-cant-run-app">weird empty file bug behavior</a>, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/395586/grails-getsomethingint-i-method-doesnt-comiple">a weird property/getter bug</a> — it just goes on and on. This is just a sample of the issues I ran into today. My last sit-down with Grails yielded a whole bunch of different issues.</p>
  
  <p>I sometimes wonder if it's worth it. I'm curious if others have experienced this. Are there people actually using Grails to productively crank out a web application? Are there other frameworks for rapid web development that I should be considering?</p>