The 2.3 GA version of the Grails web framework was released last week. The release came in the midst of the SpringOne 2GX conference, and some of the new version's features were demonstrated during the second night keynote by Grails project lead, Graeme Rocher.
On stage, Rocher publicly announced the framework's latest release, and demonstrated the built-in REST support for domain classes and entities. He also announced the first milestone release of the framework's GORM Rest Client plugin, and demonstrated its capabilities through live coding. Combining the new version of Grails and the GORM Rest Client plugin, Rocher showed how developers can map domain classes to remote REST endpoints that conform to the new versions' REST URL pattern.
Additionally, Rocher demonstrated how the version's new async namespace in GORM can be utilized for RESTfully mapped domain classes. A more in-depth discussion and demonstration of the new version's REST and async features came during Rocher's third-day talk entitled, "RESTfully Async with Grails 2.3". The features he demonstrated included: built-in REST support for domain classes; support for HATEOAS; new data rendering and binding mechanisms; and async support for controllers.
InfoQ caught up with Rocher during the conference to discuss the new version of Grails. We started by asking what feature of Grails 2.3 he considered most important. "They all are," he said, adding "a lot of the changes in Grails 2.3 were to get people used to the stuff happening Grails 3."
We also talked about the switch from Apache's Ivy to Maven's Aether dependency resolution engine. According to Rocher, the framework team received "a lot of issues from people [trying to integrate] with Maven." His view is that Aether will address many of those issues because it "provides the same semantic engine for dependencies as Maven", and "ultimately its Maven doing the work, so [the framework] will have that level of consistency." Rocher went on to discuss how the framework's integration of Aether "did a lot of work for setting the groundwork for Grails 3," and noted that Grails 3 would replace the framework's build system with Gradle.
Although Rocher has previous indicated that work on Grails 3 would start sometime in the third quarter of 2013, he confirmed that there will definitely be a 2.4 version of the framework before version 3 is released with the goal of adding better CompileStatic support. Groovy 2.2 will also be out in the next couple of month, he said.
The full list of new features available in Grails 2.3 can be found in the What's new in Grails 2.3 section of the framework's documentation. The full list of bugs and enhancement requests addressed by the Grails 2.3 release can be found in the Grails 2.3 Changelog.
