Application Architect for ThoughtWorks, Neal Ford comments on the homebrew (or what he calls craptaculous) framework and what he thinks of Grails as it approaches 1.0:

Which suggests a clear new front runner in the Java world: Grails. Because it is based on Groovy, not Java, the perception is that it is the only game in town. That will help drive the adaptation of Groovy like wildfire. In fact, I think that Grails is the engine driving the interest in Groovy. New languages are cool and all, but until you have something to do with them, they don’t catch on (look at what happened with Java when servlets came along).

Of course, I would be remiss not to mention that Rails now runs on the JVM via JRuby. However, I think this is perceived by many in the Java world as a bigger transition than Groovy and Grails. Ruby is a completely different language, with different idioms. To hard-core Java-ists, Groovy is practically Java, with most of the stinky parts removed. Once Grails becomes 1.0 and beyond, it may be salvation from the home-grown Craptaculous framework that Java developers are still using.

We have seen adoption of the Grails framework increase as more and more developers push for it from the “bottom up”. We are excited for 2008 as we believe you will be hearing much more about this Java-flavored web-framework.