As anticipated based on the recent 1.6 release of Groovy, Grails 1.1 was released today.

While there are many improvements to Grails in this release, it’s also worth pointing out that this release has made it possible to use GORM outside of Grails in any Spring application.  So if you are hesitant to jump into what you fear is the deep water with Grails (though it’s not), it’s now possible to use only the persistence framework to simplify your domain model in your Java applications without taking on the full Grails framework.

Another important new feature is much better maven integration.  Again, this makes it much easier to use Grails as a single module within a larger Java maven based ecosystem.

My guess is that this is the last JDK 1.4 compatible Grails release, since IBM announced that 9/30/2010 would be the end of support date for WebSphere 6.0 (though companies have the option to pay for up to 3 more years after that).  And that was the biggest enterprise user base still not using at least JDK 1.5.

So plan to start seeing a lot more annotation based improvements coming in the 1.2 or 2.0 pipeline for Grails.  Groovy 1.6 already showed how it could use annotations for powerful compile time metaprogramming.  It will be interesting to see how the Grails team takes that further.

In the mean time, Grails 1.1 looks great and I look forward to seeing it continue to gain market share within the Java community.

Recent posts by Jim

• Maven and OSGi for Application Lifecycle Management - June 30th, 2009
• ASP.NET MVC open sourced by Microsoft - April 8th, 2009
• Presenting GPetStore: a Groovy Pet Store in a single 500 line script - April 7th, 2009
• IE6 just crossed the downward tipping point - March 13th, 2009
• Getting closer to web based IDEs - March 5th, 2009

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