Spock VS Grails

I love using the Spock framework for its simplicity, readability, and maintainability. That's why we use Spock to drive our integration tests.

Well I care a lot that it exists. And many other people I know do as well. Just because you don't seem to like it, you shouldn't imagine everyone else is like you.

Maybe Grails is no longer used as much (like Rails itself), but Groovy found other usages since then, like https://spockframework.org/ and Jenkins pipelines (https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/syntax/). It's not going anywhere, and I see no reason for anyone to be upset about it.

In my opinion it is Spock for Java/Groovy [1]. The amount of functionality and readability you can squeeze from Groovy's DSLesque is absurd. Is basically a full fledged new test language with Java sprinkled as the test contents code

[1]: https://spockframework.org/

Groovy allows you to perform transforms on it's AST. If you look at the Spock framework, they used AST transforms to pull off a lot of the DSL.

Spock and Cucumber exemplify the philosophy of behavior-driven development (BDD). The principle behind BDD is that you must first define the desired result of the added feature in a subject-oriented language before writing any tests. The developers are then given the final documentation.

As a quick demonstration, the following (Spock) test asserts that the client JVM code fails to create an SSL connection with the service. Note that I chose to use Vert.x Web Client to handle interacting with the service, but don't let this decision distract from the core content of this post. Nevertheless, if you haven't used Vert.x, I encourage you to try it out -- especially for building server-side network applications.

And frameworks like Grails build conventions and helpers on top of Spring.

I don't have any direct experience and am only suggesting it because you mentioned RoR...But Grails (https://grails.org/) is basically the JVM version of RoR (Groovy on Rails -> Grails).

Grails - Spring under the hood. Much less boilerplate. Opinionated, which helps keep things consistent. Uses Spring-Security plugin for authentication.

Also, Grails, which a Rails like framework build on Groovy, a JVM scripting language.

Any JVM language to the rescue here? There’s one, but it’s not the one you’re thinking about. In a sign that this index may not accurately reflect our project reality, Groovy saw a meteoric rise of 0.86% to 1.04% last year! That was good for place 17. Yep, Groovy! Are people writing Gradle plugins in Groovy? Or is Grails having a resurgence? I’m as baffled as you are.