SpringSource updates Groovy and Grails

SAN MATEO, USA: SpringSource, the company behind Groovy and Grails technologies has announced the availability of Grails 1.1, a rapid web application development framework based on Groovy and Spring.

The company also released Groovy 1.6, popular dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that provides seamless integration with Java.

Grails 1.1 simplifies and accelerates web application development, enabling developers to focus on delivering new applications and capabilities to customers at a much quicker rate than complex and bloated application infrastructure alternatives.

The new release provides a deeper integration with Spring by adding Spring namespace support and standalone usage of Grails Object Relational Mapping inside Spring MVC. It also provides tighter integration with the Java ecosystem through support for key build tools such as Maven and Ant + Ivy. Additionally, Grails 1.1 provides greater support for the vibrant plug-in community with key plug-in features such as global plug-ins, transitive plug-in resolution and modular plug-in development.

“The performance we have seen from Grails has been extremely encouraging, especially against other rapid development frameworks,” said Paul Fisher, manager of technology for Wired.com. “Grails can be useful for both the novice developer, who is new to any kind of web development, and the seasoned Java developer. This simplicity has enabled us to streamline a process that previously involved redundant work between back-end and front-end developers.”

Groovy 1.6 provides greater compile-time and runtime performance improvements, abstract syntax tree (AST) transformations that support transformation annotations, and support for OSGi.

“Both releases are driven by our mission to help developers be more productive and agile, delivering a seamless experience throughout the application lifecycle,” said Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource. “There’s now a whole ecosystem for developers to rapidly build, run and manage a new generation of Web and enterprise Java applications.”

Grails 1.1 also provides incremental improvements to key components and an increased level of performance and robustness due to its foundations on Spring, clearly differentiating it from its competitors such as Django and Ruby on Rails.

Groovy 1.6 dramatically streamlines the code needed to express certain patterns and opens the language to let developers write more expressive business rules. All of this is done without compromising on the seamless integration with Java and with a higher level of performance than previous releases.

Spring, Groovy and Grails are three of the most popular application infrastructure solutions in the world. Groovy is one of the most popular alternative languages for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), reaching up to 70,000 downloads per month.

Adoption of Grails has also soared, with downloads racing from 7,000 to 70,000 per month in the past year. In November 2008, SpringSource acquired G2One Inc., the company behind the popular Groovy and Grails technologies, and now offers global enterprise support for developers and IT operations that utilize Groovy and Grails applications.