Play! vs Spring MVC - View / Controller performance

Subbu Allamaraju posted an excellent article about Node.js vs Play! for Front-End Apps.

Play! is an excellent Web framework which is quite similar to Spring MVC on the view/controller aspect and is using Groovy as the view technology.

Spring usual views (JSP, JSTL, Freemarker, Velocity) are quite outdated and I do not understand why Spring does not improve them and why Matt Raible set their as a "pro" in his comparaison.

I believe in using the Grails View as the Spring MVC View. See my previous article about the "How To" and according to the Spring MVC roadmap, Grails View support will be added to Spring 3.1.

Let's benchmark Play! vs Spring MVC with Grails View. This microbenchmark will focus only on the view/controller performance.

Grails Taglib : The template composition pattern

Grails leverages Sitemesh, a decorator engine, to support view layouts. Sitemesh layout is restricted to page layout and are not applicable to do template layout. For example a template layout which describes the composition of a table and a toolbar.

The purpose of this taglib is to define a ui composition pattern to leverage template layout.

Grails View as Spring MVC View

Introduction

The reference documentation of Spring 3 contains the following statements:

One of the areas in which Spring excels is in the separation of view technologies from the rest of the MVC framework. For example, deciding to use Velocity or XSLT in place of an existing JSP is primarily a matter of configuration. This chapter covers the major view technologies that work with Spring and touches briefly on how to add new ones.


The supported views are "JSP & JSTL", "Tiles", "Velocity & FreeMarker", "XSLT". Those are the major view technologies that work with Spring. The Spring MVC stack is usually : Spring MVC + JSP/JSTL + Tiles or SiteMesh. All these tools sound outdated, always usefull but outdated. On the other side there are frameworks like JSF, Grails, Play! (not exhaustive list) which come with great views more up to date.

Grails is the most logical choice because it uses Spring MVC internally. The task should be easier. To be honest this choice is not a very hard one because Grails view is elegant.