(sigh)
It is with grim disposition that I say "Goodbye" to my old friend Grails.
I had fun with this lovely framework and there certainly were a lot of good memories between us.

But alas, like any relationship coming to an end, I have determined that I can no longer stand certain things about it. These faults are ofcourse, not really a fault of it's own exactly...but it's just the way it is. In fact, some of the issues are just hereditary to the FAMILY my dear Grails was born into. This family is of-course Java, or JEE to be exact.

1. Deployment to Production:
I hate the fact that whenever I have to change one little thing in my production server, I literally have to compile a 50MB+ war and upload the same to my live server, stop my live server, and then restart said server....just to correct a spelling mistake! Seriously?! It's almost a 45 minute time commitment with each change to Live!!!

I knew this going in that I would have to live with this, but time and consistency (T&C) has that uncanny tendency to wear the soul out so deeply over matters once deemed seemingly trivial....like the annoying laugh of a girlfriend which you first thought nothing of at first or perhaps even thought cute, but then comes T&C to steadily degrade your opinion on the subject the more and more you hear it till it literally one day becomes the prime reason for a breakup...but I digress.

I felt it quite sad that the last deployment to my "Alpha" server was May this year....May...for an actively developed project at alpha....this is September. And it's not because I hadn't made any updates or fixed any bugs in the project...it's just because I couldn't be arsed to commit 45 minutes of my time deploying the changes! This process thoroughly discourages "rapid development" and "speedy continuous improvement" like they claim.

Nothing beats going to your production server and typing in "svn update" after which you walk away like a BAWSSSS knowing you have just deployed what you needed to deploy. I miss this simplicity back in the days of PHP, and dammit, I DEMAND this simplicity!

2. Community:
Gone are the days of me coding for coding sake. I've had my fun and all that, but now I'm more about making that paper than spending time coding out things I really shouldn't have to be doing again given that it's the 15th time I'm creating the exact same functionality. That's time I could be spending strategizing and laying out plans on how to take over the world (while keeping my soul ofcourse..like the good book says).

I find myself lately very reliant on open-source community plugins and what not. Sometimes, it pays to go with the more popular mainstream frameworks as it means people ahead of you who have the time to "trail-blaze" are doing just that, and creating nice high-quality plugins while they're at it for free-loaders enthusiasts like myself to use and turn into a nice profit.

Sadly...Grails is not one of those frameworks. Well, it's more popular than most, but it's certainly not one of the most popular. And I believe the reason for that is because the kind of people who do web development are the sort of people who typically cannot STAND breakup-reason-#1 like I can no longer do.

Also, I find the more a framework yells out words like "enterprise!", the more such trail-blazing individuals are repulsed by it (Even though what they end up running to does the exact same thing but shouts out such words less). What we are then left with are people much like myself in my current state of mind, who can't be arsed to share with free-loaders what I spent hours slaving on....not for free anyway. If we do share it, it's broken and largely unsupported because quite frankly....we have much better things to do with our time than to give you free support.

Take for example, a CMS. I've always said that the overall health of a web framework is directly proportional to the number of freely available CMS's built upon that framework....feel free to quote this as 2Buff's law of Web Framework Continuity. Grails only has ONE CMS...and it's not even all that great! As opposed to say.... Rails....which has at least 5 CMSs, and each of them are great in their own unique way!

These factors apart, Grails was a pretty awesome tool...
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But to cut the long story short, the moment I kicked the weeping Grails out of my e-life, I picked up my Phone and Ruby was there to sooth my worries and to fill the now gaping hole in my e-heart. It covered everything Grails failed at....

...Yes people....2Buff has moved to RAILS

Heh.

I've been writing a lot of Scala lately and it also has this super-annoying long compile time + packaging issue

On the other hand, writing software in a language like Ruby which are dynamically typed means many bugs are discovered at run-time, rather than compile time

I was not a fan of the JVM and static typing, but now I think the latter is a must for writing software.

lol as posted, I'm more interested in MAKING money, not giving myself a headache learning something as WTFish as scala.
I need the brainpower for making other business plans so the actual development cannot stress me. It must be done on pretty much brain auto-pilot mode.

Scala requires too much technical thinking for my liking. It feels more like a "Hey look what I can do" framework (I don pass dis level) and fails to cover some of the factor I posted up there. Fact is, whatever you say you wanna do in scala, you can achieve the same result in any other language eventually. So things like community acceptance (bigger better modules) and popularity(easier hiring when you get big enough) is important.

for some context, this was my thread a while back about what led me into Grails:

https://www.nairaland.com/1172724/grails-search-over

Basically I'm a Python/Scala guy at this point. Python is very similar to Ruby, but has way better libraries for science.

Scala is high performance and has type safety, isn't verbose and has a pretty damn nice IDE (IntelliJ) and REPL.

If I were to start my own company someday, I suspect I'd start off with those two tools.