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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

I'll chime in as well: in general it's just the most versatile and practical language I've ever come across. I can write it almost like Java if I want so I can do solid engineering with it and it performs almost the same. Then I can write scripts at the command line that get interpreted and they are more concise and powerful than shell scripts. Any time I need to play with or understand a Java API, I can fire up the Groovy REPL and just fool around with it.

So it's just an extremely useful language to have in my "tool belt", so to speak.

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Thanks for sharing mate, I really appreciate your point of view and I'll definitely be checking it.

Should I start with Grails or is there any other nice web framework I could try?

Grails is on version 3.x but not many people upgraded from version 2.x or are starting new projects in it, and the Grails 2 plugin ecosystem is dead. I don't know of any other web framework which uses Apache Groovy for its scripting. Groovy is mainly used in industry to script Gradle and write glue code for Java. If you want static typing, best skip Groovy and use Java, Kotlin, or Scala which were statically typed from the ground up, instead of having it bolted on in version 2 as did Groovy.

Thanks for the info. I'm totally ignorant about Java so it might be a dumb question. But Digital Ocean's 1gb droplets are enough to run some Java Restful APIs? I heard that Java is really heavy on memory consumption but I know nothing about it.

It depends what you want. Personally, I have moved on from Grails because (a) it's too bloated (long startup times, huge number of dependencies, very complicated to understand under the hood) and (b) a lot of that bloat is doing things that are no longer valuable to me. That is because I now code front ends more SPA style (VueJS etc) so all of the sophisticated front-end Grails stuff is completely unused and it mostly just sits there serving up REST-style APIs for which all that bloat isn't necessary. So for now I am using Micronaut [1], which I'm combining with VueJS. If that interests you, there's a project which is a template for setting up a whole front-end, backend combo based on that with a few commands [2].

Good luck!

[1] http://micronaut.io/ [2] https://gitlab.com/ssadedin/micronaut-vuejs

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