Cool New Features In Grails 0.5 Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Grails 0.5 was released today and this release is one of the most exciting releases yet. This release has closed the gap on a number of key features that needed to be knocked out before the coming 1.0 release. Some of the new features will be more appealing to some projects and other features more appealing to other pojects. For me some of the coolest new features added in 0.5 are Command Objects, List and Map Support in GORM and Custom URL Mappings. Hundres of JIRA issues have been addressed in this release and significant performance enhancements have been made. The development team got a whole lot done during this iteration. See the release notes for a more complete list of new features.

With the recent release of the first beta of Groovy 1.1, things continue to heat up in the Groovy and Grails communities.

This year I have been speaking at Java User Groups, internal training events and on the No Fluff Just Stuff Tour about Groovy and Grails and I am finding that folks in the Java community are really excited about both Groovy and Grails and the possibilities that these technologies bring to their projects. After a bit of time that really seemed kind of dull for the JVM, Groovy and Grails are making it all fun again and at the same time adding a lot of value to the enterprise by increasing productivity and expanding the possibilities. For example, defining a DSL using Antlr or similar technologies may not have been a realistic possibility for many applications but dynamic technologies like Groovy make things like that not only possible but simple to build. There are many many examples just like that which represent ways Groovy can help developers get their jobs done faster and more simply. Frankly, I don't think Grails would be anywhere near as compelling as it is if it weren't for all of the coolness made possible by Groovy. Grails has taken the possibilities that Groovy provides and leveraged them all over the framework to provide simple concise techniques for web application developers to use to build powerful web applications very quickly.

Grails has earned a lot of respect in the community by getting very far along in a short amount of time. While Grails applications are already being deployed in production environments, both private and public facing sites, the coming 1.0 release is going to push Grails right out there to the front of the pack. This is exciting stuff!

More to come... :)