Pivotal Software today announced that it will be withdrawing funding for the popular Groovy and Grails frameworks after March 31, 2015.

In their statement, Pivotal said "the decision to conclude its sponsorship of Groovy and Grails is part of Pivotal’s larger strategy to concentrate resources on accelerating both commercial and open source projects that support its growing traction in Platform-as-a-Service, Data, and Agile development. Pivotal has determined that the time is right to let further development of Groovy and Grails be led by other interested parties in the open source community who can best serve the goals of those projects."

InfoQ spoke to Groovy project manager Guillaume Laforge about the announcement.

InfoQ: What led to this announcement?

LaForge: As Pivotal's announcement and FAQ say, Pivotal decided to refocus its energy mainly around Cloud Foundry, and don't see Groovy and Grails as strategic as before. That's why they decided to stop funding the projects, despite the ongoing growth and success of the projects.

InfoQ: Was this decision by mutual agreement?

LaForge: No, it's Pivotal's decision. We would have loved continuing developing both Groovy and Grails under this umbrella, as there's a lot of synergy with our Spring team friends for example, and there's so much we could have done to help use Groovy and Grails to build the future of Cloud Foundry's infrastructure (think cloud service composition Groovy domain specific language, Grails agile dashboards / value added micro-services and backend services, etc) We were not short on ideas on how Groovy and Grails could have helped make an impact!

InfoQ: What will you do next?

LaForge: In the immediate future, we're looking forward to finding a new home for the projects, so that we can continue working full time on them, to not slow down the pace of development and innovation. But at the same time, of course, we still keep on developing the projects themselves. We're actually planning an imminent release of Groovy 2.4, and Grails 3.0 will follow suit afterwards.

InfoQ: Do you have any prospective backers going forward?

LaForge: We're discussing with potential backers, but so far, haven't found a definitive answer to our search for a new home. With the announcement, perhaps a new potential interested third party will emerge.

InfoQ: How will this impact Groovy/Grails March and beyond?

LaForge: As I said, we continue to develop Groovy and Grails as usual, we have plenty of work to do and ideas to develop. The risk is that we may not necessarily be able to develop at full speed as usual, but at a more reduced pace. We might perhaps rethink some big bang features and try to reschedule them more cleverly in a piece-meal fashion, etc. However thanks to the community's contributions, we know Groovy and Grails will live on and continue to evolve, but finding a new home willing to fund the project and its teams full time would tremendously help.

InfoQ: What is on the horizon for Groovy/Grails as a product?

LaForge: I mentioned the Groovy 2.4 and Grails 3.0 imminent releases. Groovy 2.4 will bring very nice support for the Android platform, allowing you to build mobile apps with Groovy in a very productive and elegant way, but we also worked on various performance improvements. For Grails 3, that's the big re-architecting around Spring Boot, making Grails 3 a nice fit for the buzz-trendy micro-services era. For Groovy going forward, we have a lot more ideas we want to pursue, like more support for Java 8 constructs (in particular adopting some new syntax elements), enhancing and reworking our internal dynamic runtime, our ongoing work on performance (as well as shorter bytecode, trimming down a bit of memory consumption, etc), and we are also thinking of adding some kind of macros to help developers author code transformations to kill some more boilerplate code compared to raw Java. We're definitely not short on ideas on how to further improve the projects to make our developers more productive using the language and the framework!

InfoQ: Well we do wish you the best of luck. Groovy is a great platform, and has impacted Java itself, inspiring Project Lambda, Project Coin, and the trend towards making Java more functional.

LaForge: Thanks a lot for the interview, your support, and your kind words!

With regards to support contracts, Pivotal says they will honor all existing contracts for the current term. Pivotal also says this decision will not reflect any change in their support of the Spring framework.