Ask HN: Ruby/Rails or Groovy/Grails?

1 pointmanasnutcase3 comments

Hey Guys, We are building a web app from ground up. We are using Neo4j for data management. Should we go with Ruby on Rails or Grails? ROR resources are far and few. But Java people are in abundance here. Im hoping they will be able to quickly pick up Groovy/Grails too. Also, we will be building many web apps in future too. So from that perspective, which tech stack do you think makes more sense? Thanks.

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> ROR resources are far and few

Not really, ROR community is very active, there's millions of gems that do what you need, and there's plenty of websites that teach ROR (railcasts.com, ruby-toolbox.com,...), you can find help on IRC almost instantly. There's as much resources as you need, almost anything that you need to do has probably already been done and a tutorial/gem written.

Sorry, by "resources", I meant "experienced ROR developers" and thats a statement specific to my city- Kolkata, India. Wish I was in Chicago or San Francisco. :) Indeed, online help is available, but its time consuming if the developer doesnt have sufficient experience. All large tech companies in India have Java practice, so Java developers are in abundance, and usually have better coding habits too. This may not be true in some other places.

I have built many java/grails based web applications in the past 2 years and I would agree that the support for grails/java is much better. The community is pretty active and the fact that grails allows you to fallback to java and runs in a time tested environment(ie the jvm) is an asset in itself. The spring framework which is the backbone for grails is also widely supported and frankly blows RoR out of the water when it comes to documentation, support, experienced developer base. I would definitely support a grails/Java stack compared to a RoR stack hands down.

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