Grails for Ajax

When Ajax was introduced to the early and experienced developers, only JavaScript developers rejoiced because that is the main programming language of Ajax. Others who wanted to jump in the Ajax bandwagon would just have to study the language from the scratch.

Among the developers, those who already knew Java were struggling to cope up. Not that they do not know the language but their knowledge are just in the gateway to know something but not everything. They were forced to leave Java and move to JavaScript just to use Ajax.

Fortunately, that should never be the case anymore. With Google in the frontline, Java developers could use a Java based framework and end up developing a highly efficient Ajax based application. Others followed suit with remarkable success.

One of those frameworks that use Java with remarkable functions is Grails. This open-source framework is an RAD type framework – that means it can easily go real fast and an application could easily be established in no time at all. Grails uses the popular Groovy language for their scripts. Going with Grails to be used in this framework are additional frameworks of Java, Hibernate and Spring.

Grails is not actually hard to learn in the first place. Developers who are already using Ruby on Rails will definitely see the similarity with Grails. That is exactly the idea of Grails – instead of developing another language to learn, it is just tied up with another framework. If you are new in learning Grails, you will be glad to know that you are also learning Rails at the same time.

The best feature of Grails which is probably its best draw is the ability to use XML and JSON at the same time. The option of using only one of them is practically eliminated. When one of the mark-up languages cannot be used due to browser and other concerns, the other mark-up takes over and distributes the information. It is a really simple concept but really hard to configure that other frameworks opted to ignore this feature.

If you treat Grails as a standalone framework for a simple Java-based application, you should be able build a good application. On the other hand, if you are proficient with Java and would like to extend to Ajax, this framework provides a highly efficient rendering of Ajax functions.

You can render different functions while integrating another framework to make even work better. Don’t forget that you can use XML and JSON at the same time to provide even more information to users faster.

And besides all of these, the adaptive tags could also be integrated to another framework. Its adaptive tags for Ajax make it a good add-on to another library. All you need to do is to add the library of the Grails in the header and the tags of Grails will be adapting to another framework.

If you’re looking for a good framework that has lots of features while keeping a very RAD behavior, go with Grails. Since this has striking resemblance with Rails, the benefits of learning this framework is really more than you can ask for.