Griffon 0.9.4 released

The Griffon team is happy to announce the release of Griffon 0.9.4!

Griffon is a Grails inspired framework for writing RIAs on the JVM using Groovy.
A list of bugs fixed in this release can be found at [http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=11833&version=17638].
Full release notes located here.

This release adds a missing buildtime configuration optin: the ability to specify file encoding other than the default UTF-8.

In terms of runtime capabilities we added a few tweaks to services. It's now possible to instruct the Griffon runtime to eagerly instantiate all services (default is lazy). You can also grab hold of any service (even instantiate it on the fly if the instance was not ready) using a new helper class: griffon.core.ServiceManager.
MVC groups are the cornerstone of a Griffon application, however until now there was no concrete type that identified them nor their configuration. There are now a pair of types that fix this problem. Meet griffon.core.MVCGroupConfiguration and griffon.core.MVCGroup. The MVCGroupManager and MVCHandler interfaces have been retrofitted with these types. You can grab hold of an mvcGroupConfiguration instance for example and create an mvcGroup instance directly.

Speaking of managers, developers now have the ability to define alternate implementations of the following types: ArtifactManager, AddonManager, MVCGroupManager. The default implementations are good enough for most cases. But, you never know when you'll need an extension so that's why we provided these hooks.

Lastly, there's a number of breaking changes explained in the release notes.

You can download the Griffon distribution from the download page.

Thanks to all who contributed to this release!

But that's not all! There are plenty of plugin updates that tagged along for this release. For example, all persistence plugins (except Carbonado) now support multiple datasources (including CMIS). There 3 new nosql options too: Redis, Terrastore and Voldemort. The Spock and FEST plugns should work now nicely with Groovy 1.8.2 (don't forget about Easyb and UiSpec4j either!). All remoting and persistence plugins expose a Java friendly API as well.

And for all the Gradle fans out there, there's a new plugin in town: griffon-gradle. Uhu, that's right. Build a Griffon application using Gradle. We're deeply grateful to Luke Daley and Peter Ledbrook for their trailbazing efforts in this space, as we based our codebase on the respective Grails plugin and launcher made by them. Open source FTW!

Keep on Groovying!

PS: Can't wait for an issue to be fixed? Have an idea for a cool feature? Fork us at github and send us a pull request :-)