Grails 3.0 Released and the Road Ahead

Today is significant on a number of fronts. First, the Grails team released Grails 3.0 which as we outlined last year is a dramatic reimagining of the framework thousands of developers have grown to love.

Grails 3.0 has been rewritten from the ground up ontop of Spring Boot and Gradle. In additional it includes support for application profiles which allows the creation of distinct application templates targeting different development environments or deployment targets.

We are hugely excited to make this new release available to the Groovy and Grails communities and look forward to the plugin community contributing to the new release via the new Bintray-powered plugin portal.

The other significant part about today is it is my last day at Pivotal (as well a the rest of the Groovy/Grails team). It has been a quite wonderful journey, from the exciting days of birthing a startup, to being acquired by SpringSource where I got to work with some of the most talented people in the industry (I will always be grateful to Rod Johnson and Adrian Colyer for granting me that opportunity).

It is unfortunate that the company that exists today (Pivotal) is very different to what SpringSource was and is going in a new direction which Groovy and Grails have no part of. Nevertheless, I count myself as privileged to have had the chance help define the future of application development on the JVM during my time there.

Looking to the future it is great to see Groovy moving to Apache and with its strong community and solid support from the Apache foundation the future is extremely bright for the project going forward.

On the Grails side, long term we will also be moving Grails to a foundation, although we have yet to start conversations with the various foundations. We are still in discussions with various companies about continuing sponsorship of the development of the framework and hope to have something to announce soon.

For now though I plan to take some time off until May, after what has been a rather tumultuous time since the decision and subsequent announcement in January. I look forward to returning raring to go and continuing to contribute to the growth of the Groovy and Grails communities and this fabulous ecosystem that I have enjoyed contribuing to over the last 7 years.