On the road to Grails 1.0: An incredible amount of Grails stuff going on

Apologies to frequent readers of this blog that I've been a bit quite, but we're plowing away trying get get Grails 1.0 out in time for Christmas. In the meantime an incredible amount of activity has gone on around the Grails community.

Firstly, congrats to Martin and Geertjan from Sun for their work on the NetBeans Groovy/Grails integration, it looks very promising and it is nice to see the progress made by the open source IDEs given the great support we have in IntelliJ iDEA.

Next thing I wanted to mention was the incredible amount of code that is being written by the community to make Grails even better. The guys at Catalina Consulting have created no fewer than 3 new plug-ins that provide integration with Amazon S3, the Red5 Flash Server and Streaming Video support to Grails.

However, there is more! To further increase Grails' integrations with Java based Ajax stacks two new plug-ins have been created by our users. The ZK Grails Plugin provides integration with ZK, a rich event-driven, component oriented Ajax stack. Whilst, the Echo2 Grails Plugin does the same for Echo2, another component oriented Ajax stack that lets you create Ajax apps in a similar way to Swing.

What is interesting for me about these two plug-ins is:

1. It demonstrates how Grails can be integrated with existing Java frameworks to further enhance its capabilities. This is all down to Groovy's seamless integration with Java and Grails' extensible Plug-in system.
2. We now have Plug-ins that provide varying levels of integration for many of the significant Java based Ajax stacks such as GWT, Echo2, DWR, ZK, Open Laszlo and Dojo. All driven by our user community.

Other things of significance include the launch of 4 new public Grails based sites in the past month, including:

• WorkBoard - A FaceBook application that provides classified ads
  
• Food Tube - A London restaurant guide and booking service
• FilmSuggestions.com - Catalogue your favourite films, commenting and tagging as you go
• Job Insiders - A German Job rating community

Congrats to the guys behind those sites. So overall exciting times for Groovy and Grails and with 1.0 out soon, hopefully 2008 will be another big year.

Grails Development with IntelliJ IDEA

The JetBrains folks have contributed a great write-up on the wiki summarising the powerful capability offered by JetGroovy, their Groovy/Grails plug-in for IntelliJ IDEA.

Grails eXchange - The aftermath

I have been meaning to do a write-up on the Grails eXchange 2007, a great conference hosted by my former employers Skills Matter.

Overall the conference was great, it had the feel of some of the No Fluff events I've been to and it was awesome to have so many people passionate about Groovy & Grails in the same place.

Some of the highlights for me were seeing the amazing JetGroovy plug-in in action demo'ed by JetBrains, Meeting the awwwesome (pronounced with a proper ozzy accent of course) Glen Smith (the man behind Groovy blogs) and his presentation entitled "The Whole Nine Yards" and the general networking and social aspect.

Now its back to focusing on getting Grails 1.0 out. My current focus is not on code, but on improving our documentation. Stay tuned.