Groovy and Grails are both amazing, been doing development for quite sometime and have tried various languages. Can honestly for a new web based application I would chose Grails over the others.
Grails is an amazing technology founded on two very time tested technologies being Spring and Hibernate. The programming language itself is Groovy which in turn is founded on Java
For those coming from PHP, Python and Rails the thought of using something based on Java frameworks may be a turnoff but I assure you all the boilerplating and configuration complexity is hidden away with the preference being the convention over configuration approach.
The beauty though is if you need to reach down and leverage some specifics you are free to do so, Grails doesn't tie your hands allowing you to have your cake and eat it to.
So in a nutshell, Grails gives you all the things you love with frameworks like Rails while under the Hood you can leverage the power of Java and all the supporting libraries and frameworks developed for it over the years. Anywhere it can go Grails&Groovy can go to (well almost). Oh and in terms of performance, the upcoming version of Groovy 2.0 will provide performance enhancements that will bring it seriously close to Java execution through static type checking and compilation. These two options are once again free to use or ignore as the developer sees fit.
For large scale web applications most of these frameworks will not work because they don't scale. I know Twitter is an exceptional case but why do you think they are converting their Ruby code to Scala?
I personally like Grails which uses Groovy for the programming language. To enhance performance and obtain near Java like speed there is a statically typed extension called Groovy++. Because it operates heavily off of type inference it is extremely non-intrusive when being introduced to existing code.
Yes it is for the same site I've mentioned here in the past and can be seen in my submission history.
I didn't want to mix it in with the topic so people wouldn't think I was using it to further promote the project :)
I have had interest expressed by many people in the past to help out but what I have experienced is that when it comes to really getting down to it and doing real work, that interest dissipates very rapidly. :)
Thanks for the feedback and links. Both provide some very good points to think about.
You are correct about the time constraint and perhaps I could pay for some of the work and perhaps that is the only way, but then I need to get into finding the correct person and are they really going to be able to do the work and such.
Having the right partner would simply things but finding one will probably not be so easy.
It's a bit disappointing not to see more mention of Groovy/Grails.
It has all the great features you get with Ruby/Rails but built on two solid time tested technologies being Spring and Hibernate. Not to mention the ability to integrate with pretty much no effort with existing Java infrastructures.
The tasks are primarily back-end oriented and focus mainly on areas of scaling. An understanding of Java is needed and it would be nice to know Groovy as well.
I'm the sole developer of this site which is not funded so it would be an equity position initially which is why I was mentioning partner. I know this is a big turn-off for most but it is what it is.
Yes but there is still the problem of usage though. Getting people to visit and comeback to any social site is tough these days with the likes of FB and Twitter especially if the ui is ugly like the one I have now atm heh.