What are some issues holding up Groovy and Grails adoption that you’ve encountered? The biggest I see have less to do with the technologies itself and more about the marketplace. Specifically, issues about finding developers familiar with the technology in the first place seem to be a major issue affecting a company’s confidence in adopting Groovy or Grails for a project. This seems very much a chicken/egg situation – where will people get the experience using it if it’s not used, right?
Fortunately, I’ve personally been able to see some Grails and Groovy projects launch over the last year, helping to bring the numbers of experienced developers up, if only by a small amount, but I’d like to hear about more success stories. Matt Woodward’s piece in the March 2010 issue is encouraging as well, because it may help prod developers from other camps (ColdFusion in his case, PHP in mine) to come in to the Grails camp, expanding the total pie. While it’s great to get Java developers to use Grails as their primary web framework, we’re only growing Grails at the expense of other frameworks, and that does nothing to enlarge the share of the JVM as a web platform.
I see commodity hosting as a longstanding (but hopefully not eternal) stumbling block in the Java world, and keep hoping someone will address this with an offer targeting Grails. Ideally a customized hosting solution with the breadth of plesk or webmin with custom management for Grails apps.
Maybe I’m too much a stick-in-the-mud, and not with the current ‘cloud’ bandwagon. Perhaps everyone is content with Google App Engine, but I don’t see those sorts of solutions (AWS, etc) as providing much beyond mechanical plumbing. There seem to be issues with SSL support for GAE as well, so it’s not something suitable for a majority of security-minded apps.
What’s your view on the state of the Groovosphere?
Thanks Groovy and Grails teams for your continued gr8 work!
