Grails 1.0 released!

Graeme Rocher just announced on the Grails mailing list the release of Grails 1.0. I'm very happy to announce this news here on Groovy Zone since more than 2 years ago I stood at the cradle of Grails together with Graeme, Guillaume La Forge and Dierk Koenig. Grails, Groovy and the entire Java community has gone a long way since then.

Grails has seen the rise of many competitors since its inception. JRuby on Rails has become a reality. Seam is going strong. Yet the popularity of Groovy and Grails is undeniable, as the traffic on Groovy Zone indicates.

Thanks to the Grails development team for all the hard work. Grails went through quite a few refactorings. Out of this came ExpandoMetaClass which helped to re-write the Meta-Object Protocol in Groovy 1.5. I also like BeanBuilder, a Groovy builder for configuring a Spring ApplicationContext.

For me Grails is the ultimate rapid prototyping platform for Java. I've built numerous applications by dropping in existing Hibernate-configurated classes and generate scaffolding views. It gets you started really quickly and helps you to focus on the application you're building.

GSP and the Grails tag libraries are amazing, they're so much better than JSP tags. And lets not forget the numerous Grails plugins. The Search plugin is terrific, it instantly adds search functionality to your application. Check out all the Grails plugins for your needs.

Download Grails 1.0 here. Read the user guide here. Watch the screen casts here. Check out the Grails and Groovy books here.

Happy coding!