Apache Groovy vs. Grails vs. Java vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow Comparison Chart

A powerful Groovy-based web application framework for the JVM built on top of Spring Boot. Convention-over-configuration, sensible defaults, opinionated APIs, and the Groovy language combine to make the Grails® framework easy to learn for Java developers. The Grails framework is built on top of Spring Boot and leverages Spring Boot's time-saving features, such as Spring-powered dependency injection. The Grails framework seamlessly and transparently integrates and interoperates with Java, the JVM, and existing Java EE containers. Apache Groovy is a language for the Java platform designed to enhance developers' productivity. It is an optionally-typed and dynamic language but with static-typing and static compilation capabilities. The Grails framework seamlessly integrates with GORM, a data access toolkit that provides a rich set of APIs for accessing relational and non-relational data. GORM also includes implementations for Hibernate (SQL), MongoDB, Cassandra, and Neo4j.

Microservice-based streaming and batch data processing for Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. Spring Cloud Data Flow provides tools to create complex topologies for streaming and batch data pipelines. The data pipelines consist of Spring Boot apps, built using the Spring Cloud Stream or Spring Cloud Task microservice frameworks. Spring Cloud Data Flow supports a range of data processing use cases, from ETL to import/export, event streaming, and predictive analytics. The Spring Cloud Data Flow server uses Spring Cloud Deployer, to deploy data pipelines made of Spring Cloud Stream or Spring Cloud Task applications onto modern platforms such as Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. A selection of pre-built stream and task/batch starter apps for various data integration and processing scenarios facilitate learning and experimentation. Custom stream and task applications, targeting different middleware or data services, can be built using the familiar Spring Boot style programming model.