Friday, November 23, 2007

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.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

All of this is wonderful Graeme, and as a developer I can't thank you enough for all the work you do with Grails. I have a question, though; as a developer just starting to work with Grails, many books on Grails were written with older versions of the framework beings used. Personally I am working through the Apress book now, and with RC1 on my machine I am running into some differences between the older releases and RC1, as you might imagine. So here's my question: is there a way to obtain older versions of the framework for learning purposes? I'd be interested to know, as I'm sure would be many budding Grails developers. Thanks again!

Dmitriy Kopylenko said...

Steve,

you could find all versions of Grails here: http://dist.codehaus.org/grails/

Cheers,
Dmitriy

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much Dimitry!

Unknown said...

Graeme, Is there any point to creating a how-to article on building the grails-docs article on the wiki? If so, I'd be happy to do it.

The docs on the grails.org site are great. Today, I the site was inaccessible to me and it took a bit of digging to find sources so I could build them and have them locally. Do you think a how-to in the wiki is appropriate?

Unknown said...

Does Fortune TOP 1 company use Grails for their web-site too? http://www.walmart.com/cart.gsp <<

Graeme Rocher said...

Interesting.. maybe! From the looks of the site it seems they have some struts in there to with *.do actions. Maybe its just coincidence i have no idea if they use Grails or GSP

Anonymous said...

Graeme,

I was really struggling between using Echo2, JZeno and Grails on a new project http://www.emallme.com. Now that Grails supports Echo2, I no longer need to :)

Great going!
/Carl