Last week I was totally excited when I finally took a close look at Groovy so I decided to try to use Grails to develop some RAD database web-based front end. And boy was I disapointed.

Finally I ended up trying with Rails (aka Ruby on Rails) and that was it. In two days and a couple hundred of lines of code I had my functional SQL-based web site front end.

Now there's a story here and it's not about whether Groovy or Ruby and which one is good or bad. The fact is I wanted to use Groovy because of it being Java based, with the expectation that I was already familiar with the Java syntax so Groovy should be easy to pick up, right? On the other hand, I didn't care for learning Ruby's syntax.

In the end after spending several hours experimenting with both, Ruby was easier to use than Groovy despite it being a new syntax. The reason has unfortunately nothing to do with the technical merits of the languages (both are equivalent IMHO).

The real reason is the documentation and their respective web site.

Ruby's web site is developer-oriented, with direct links to various tutorials including the OnLAMP articles on Rails, direct link to javadoc-like Rails documentation for all classes and more important a wiki with tons of user feedback and tips.

The Groovy web site on the other hand lacks all of these. There are a couple of tutorials to get started with Groovy but these lack depth. Once I was past the initial step of installing Groovy and creating an empty Grails application, I was mostly left in the dark. Interestingly, the Grails tutorial starts talking right away about controllers and views without ever defining them. It's almost as if Grails was a pure Rails clone and the developers expected their users to be already familiar with Rails' terminology and the way of doing things (which I believe is exactly where the problem is.)

In the end one almost needs to learn Rails before starting to understand Grails. Which sounds to me like a lack of vision typical of open source projects. Anyone that checks out Grails might just end up frustrated like I did, go to Rails and once there just not come back to Grails.