Grails on Google-App-Engine - Is it dead?

Question

To create a web application on Google's AppEngine I was looking for a framework. During my research I came across Groovy and Grails. I'm a Java kind of guy so I prefer something Java-like above Python frameworks (like Django). So I scraped together some information and decided that Groovy and Grails are both to my liking.

While trying to dig deeper into Grails in combination with AppEngine I found that the Grails GAE Plugin hasn't been updaten in two years and on the website it says it "works with the latest Grails 1.3 RC2 release and above"[3]. The newest version of Grails (as of today) is 2.1.1[4]. So I'm wondering if the plugin is still maintained. Of course, the plugin could be so good, that it doesn't need maintenance - but in my experience this really looks like the plugin is dead.

So what I would like to know if there are people out there currently working with (or have recently worked with) a recent version of Grails on AppEngine and whether it is a pain in the... fingertip or a solid framework.

If you believe that Grails on App-Engine is dead I would really like to hear about alternatives, so please let me know if you used a framework on AppEngine, what you used and how the experience was.

To be a bit more precise on my requirements; a framework I would want to use should

• be Java-like or Java
• run on Google AppEngine
• have some degree of scaffolding mechanism (I'm really lazy when it comes to writing code that could easily be able to generate)
• take away the pain of database handling with SQL by providing a solid NoSQL persistence layer

Before you link any other Stackoverflow posts in your answers, please be aware that I have done my research on stackoverflow before asking this, sadly I found no up-to-date information - of course I could have overlooked something, but please don't link articles older than a year, it doesn't help here.

Sorry for the long text, shorten if you like and deem it necessary.

Thank you in advance for your helpful answers.

Answer 1

The App Engine plugin for Grails has not been updated for 2.X. The announcement from Graem Rocher can be found here

Grails currently throws a error when you attempt to run-app against 2.1.1. An issue concerning this has been raised here

Answer 2

I tried Grails with Google App Engine long time ago. As in previous answers was stated - there is no current version of the plugin. However if this is an option for you to consider, try CloudFoundry service. It's fully compatible with Grails.

Answer 3

I tried out Grails on App Engine using the plugin mentioned above. I wrote a series of blog postings about it. I don't think the Grails App Engine plugin is actively maintained anymore.

I personally switched to Gaelyk which is a lightweight web toolkit for App Engine written in Groovy. It should fulfill all your requirements.

Answer 4

Consider the Play Framework a light weight framework for Web Applications.

Answer 5

Update 2017 : There is a new tutorial for Grails 3.2.9

http://guides.grails.org/grails-google-cloud/guide/index.html