2GX: Keynote - The Amazing Growth of Grails

So, I'm back from the 2GX - The Groovy/Grails Experience which was yet another event, brilliantly put together by Jay Zimmerman and the No Fluff crew. The good news is, if you missed out there is another one in the fall/autumn months in San Jose, CA.

The attendance was excellent for such a focused conference with close to 200 people in total all buzzing about Groovy & Grails. I delivered my "State of Grails" keynote on the Thursday evening which went into some analysis of where we are since the release of Grails 1.0 from a growth perspective, but also from a technology perspective.

I wasn't planning to, but a few people at the conference asked me to post my slides to help persuade managers etc. of the viability of Grails, not just from a technical perspective, but from a growth and community perspective. So if you're in the same position, check out my slides, the following is a summary of the contents.

When we released Grails 1.0, Codehaus' bandwith usage went up by a staggering 40gb. The downloads have been in the 10s of thousands since the release and luckily Contegix, the kind folks who host Codehaus, have freed up some extra bandwith for the servers.

The mailing list traffic on the Grails user mailing list has gone through the roof, averaging close to 140 messages a day in January and looking the same for Feb:


The traffic is contributing to make Grails one of the most vibrant communities around anyone one Java web framework according to Nabble:


Further evidence of the growing community is the Grails plug-in eco-system where Grails now has no less than 47 user contributed plug-ins in the plug-in repository representing nearly 2 million lines of user contributed code:


Blog traffic is also on the up, a year ago the blog traffic for Grails was merely a blip on the horizon (all probably posted by me ;-). Now according to technorati people are talking about Grails, a lot:


Clearly, we still have a long way to go to make Grails as hugely popular as things like Spring and Hibernate, but we're heading in the right direction which is great news.