Grails 1.1.1, Gr8conf, AppEngine and other happenings

Just got back from Gr8conf and really had a blast. It was a nice small group of 90-100 which meant you could really have a lot of one on one time with many of the attendees who had questions. The sessions were also not too short. Having that extra bit of time to elaborate on things makes a real different compared to the 45 minute rush you have at JavaOne et al.

All in all it felt more like a No Fluff event, which can only be described as a good thing. Right before the conference we released Grails 1.1.1 which is mainly a bug fix release, but the exciting part is the new Google AppEngine plugin which works with Grails 1.1.1

The plugin takes the heavy lifting out of configuring a Grails application for usage on AppEngine by automatically configuring the AppEngine development environment and a JDO persistence layer (JPA is coming too soon). You get reloading out of the box too, so Grails + AppEngine is really the most productive environment for developing JVM applications for AppEngine.

One missing feature from the AppEngine support right now is GORM (you have to use the raw JDO APIs). However, we are hard at work developing GORM-JPA (and potentially GORM-JDO) which will bring most of the features of GORM on top of standard JPA.

GORM-JPA is not the only exciting thing happening right now in the Grails plugin front. We are working with Adobe on integrating Flex and BlazeDS closely with Spring. The results of that can be seen in the recent Spring/BlazeDS integration 1.0 Rc2 release. The next phase is to build on top of that for the Grails plugin which is on my todo list to complete soon. Exciting times.

The plugin community itself continues to flourish, checkout these:

• It is now finally possible to write Grails applications for different Portals such as Liferay and Pluto thanks to the Portlets plugins.
  
• There is an excellent new plugin that embeds an LDAP server into Grails for easily testing LDAP
• The Flex Scaffold plugin let's you generated complete CRUD applications using Grails and Adobe Flex
• The Build Test Data plugin let's you quickly create dummy test data
• Using the Spring WS plugin writing SOAP web services, feels more like writing REST service. Easy and painless.

These are just a few isolated mentions, there is activity going on all the time on the plugin space.

Grails 1.1 Released

Yes! Grails 1.1 is out and available for download. Checkout my blog post on the SpringSource team blog for a more detailed overview of the highlights. It is a strange feeling after a release goes out, like a mixture of relief, happiness and that "ok what now" feeling. Maybe I take software too seriously :-|

Nice to see how Twitter is abuzz with the news (note live results, link will change overtime) right now. Other than that we are now planning the launch of the Grails.org plugin portal. To support that I have been writing a few plugins for Grails. It is niceto actually write Grails apps/plugins rather than work on the internals all the time.

Anyway the result is 2 new plugins called Commentable and Taggable that allow you to generically tag and comment on domain instances. I also have a new blog plugin in the works which will power the new Grails.org blog when that is ready. Actually its already available, but I need to document it better, and I'll save that for another post.

As for beyond Grails 1.1, we are now at the planning phase, but there are loads of things we are considering from OSGi to JCR to Cloud computing. Exciting times.

Grails at the London Java WUG

I'll be doing a talk at the London Java Web User Group on Building Twitter with Grails in 40 Minutes on Monday the 16th of February. If you want to come a long you need to register ASAP, the last talk I did we had to turn away people as we could only fit 70 in the room.

See you there!

Grails Happenings: 1.1, Wired, Book etc.

Regular readers, I must apologize for the relative lack of updates compared to 2008, but it seems I have caught the Twitter bug, where you can get more frequent ramblings of my activities.

Nevertheless, we are progressing well with Grails 1.1 which should be out this month. Loads of exciting stuff is on the way and I am really happy with what we have achieved. The Groovy 1.6 + Grails 1.1 combination is going to be a great one.

In other news we (SpringSource) have done a case study with Wired.com about their usage of Grails. We hope to put out more case studies and white papers in the future about Grails for those looking to convince their managers that Grails is the way to go. You can download the case study here.

In other news InfoQ has a nice article up about Grails and Dynamic Jasper. For thsoe of you who don't know, InfoQ are also the organizers of QCon, which I will be speaking at in March. I'll also be doing a half day Groovy/Grails workshop at the JavaOne University this year if you're looking for a more comprehensive engagement.

Finally, Jeff and I completed The Definitive Guide to Grails, Second Edition which is a complete re-write (and a heftier one at that) of the original book with up-t0-date information covering Grails 1.0 and many of the features of Grails 1.1.

Grails & Maven Kiss and Make-up with Grails 1.1 Beta 2

So Grails 1.1 Beta 2 is out. Rejoice! There are many new features that are detailed in the release notes. However, one of the main ones in this beta is the new support for Maven.

Regular readers of my blog will probably be aware of my long history as one who, ahem, is not particularily fond of Maven. Granted I am still not particularily fond of Maven, but it is the Christmas period and in the spirit of "why can't we all just get a long" I am proud to say that Grails integrates nicely with Maven now :-)

Peter Ledbrook, core Grails committers, has been tirelessly working away at making the Grails + Maven experience a seamless one. I personally even went as far as installing Maven 2 onto my machine, which was a huge jump for me I can tell you, and I can tell you Peter's done a great job!

As ever we encourage Maven users to give the Maven integration a go and report any issues that you may have with it in JIRA. Enjoy!

Grails + Spring Integration

Regular readers will recall I mentioned in my announcement of the SpringSource acquisition of G2One that the potential to integrate Grails with more Spring portfolio products is huge. Well, SpringSource colleague Russ Miles has taken the first steps in integrating Grails with Spring Integration 1.0.

For those of you who don't know, Spring Integration is a lightweight way to do message passing through endpoints in a similar way to some of the big ESBs. The article is a precursor to even more exciting stuff involving Spring Integration being made available as a Grails plugin. Watch this space.

Interview with me on Grails Podcast

Those crazy guys over at the Grails podcast interviewed me about various things ranging from being part of SpringSource to the upcoming Grails 1.1 release to my deep hatred of all things Maven. Check it out.

Groovy and Grails join the Spring family

You may have already read about it in the various news outlets and blogs covering the announcement, but if you haven’t I’m excited to spread the word that G2One - The Groovy/Grails company - has been acquired by SpringSource. The result is that Groovy and Grails join the growing number of excellent Open Source projects delivered by SpringSource.

The Spring Framework really pioneered simplified development on the Java platform. A philosophy that is the very essence of Grails. Both frameworks aggressively try to makes the lives of developers easier. The Spring Framework provides an abstraction layer of common Java enterprise APIs, whilst Grails uses the Groovy dynamic language to further simplify Spring and Java. In this sense Grails fits perfectly into SpringSource’s philosophy.

On the Grails front this is great news at multiple levels. With Grails already being based on Spring, users of Grails now have access to expertise about not only Grails, but also Spring, the framework that underpins all of Grails. Grails will benefit further from tighter integration with the Spring Framework with exciting integration possibilities on the horizon between Grails and great Spring portfolio products like Spring Batch, Spring Integration and SpringSource dm Server.

Grails will benefit from greater visibility and wider adoption simply by being under the SpringSource umbrella. In addition, SpringSource will bring all their expertise around Eclipse plugin development ensuring that users of Groovy and Grails have a first class experience in the Eclipse IDE.

At SpringSource, there is a lot of excitement about Groovy and Grails. Grails adds that little bit of Web 2.0 spice to the company and provides yet another avenue for users to adopt the Spring Framework. We’re literally buzzing with ideas on how Spring, Groovy and Grails can be integrated in the future and look forward to the feedback of the respective communities.

I personally will continue to lead Grails at SpringSource, whilst Guillaume remains the project lead of Groovy. The majority of the former G2One team have taken up positions at SpringSource. On the topic of Guillaume, he is as excited about this development as I am and has a great post on the benefits of the acquisition to Groovy. Check it out!

Resources:

• SpringSource/G2One Acquisition Announcement
  
• Guillaume LaForge’s Blog
  
• Rod Johnson's Blog