Grails 0.4, an application framework closely resembling Ruby on Rails, except with Groovy, has been released. Notable improvements include:

• ORM enhancements with support for more relationship types, easy transactions and criteria building, constraints to SQL schema mappings, and upgrade to Hibernate 3.2
• All-new non-invasive plugin system for writing reusable plugins for Grails applications
• Greater Spring integration thanks to a new syntax for scripting Spring and an upgrade to Spring 2.0
• A new Groovy-based build system based on Gant for easy command line scripting
• Grails now ships with Groovy 1.0

Resources:

• The full release announcement
• Change log

Grails 0.4, an application framework closely resembling Ruby on Rails, except with Groovy, has been released.

This is great. Grails shows continuous improvements. Besides all the new features, there are also lots (> 200) of incremental improvements and bug fixes. One more comment about Rails and Grails: While Grails was/is looking at Rails for it's "lean" approach to development and the use of Convention over Configuration, it has a much stronger fundament it stays on. Hibernate as the ORM engine (instead of ActiveRecord..), Spring for IoC and as the underlying MVC controller, Quartz for Job Management.. But you don't feel these tools in a bad way, you don't have to configure 25 XML files in many different places, they just work for you if you are using Grails. Last not least the Plugin system is a very obvious extension (but not easy to design) and it is great to see this coming to Grails. Thanks to the all committers and all supporters for working on Grails. I am sure, that this will change how people think about fast, easy and reliable development in the Java world. Stephan Albers jCatalog Software AG

Should this be considered an 'early release' or 'almost ready for use in production systems?' Paul , Technology in Plain English

Should this be considered an 'early release' or 'almost ready for use in production systems?'

From the release announcement: "Two new Grails-powered public production sites - the PepsiCo owned Copella Juice range (http://www.copellafruitjuices.co.uk) and TV Voting (http://www.tvvoting.com) - went live and much of the development was driven by the needs of such projects." Groovy 1.0 is out and stable. Grails is builded upon well known and tested libraries, so the basic stability is already very good. There are certainly more features request (and more bugs left), but the project is active and the list very responsive. We are currently working on some applications for product information management written with Grails that will go live in the next few months. These are typical business applications, so this works with Grails, too. BTW: the correct link to the Grails page is http://www.grails.org/ Stephan Albers jCatalog Softwarea AG

is there any performance info available using grails? i've read the grails book and i like the look, just wondering how it would run. keep up the good work, it's great to finally have a scripting option on the JVM, I've always felt that scripting languages are much better for web development but its nice to have the security of the usual libraries behind it.

is there any performance info available using grails? i've read the grails book and i like the look, just wondering how it would run.

I don't know any Grails performance tests yet. Overall I like the performance and it is good enough for us. Grails is written in parts in Java and parts in Groovy. Groovy seems to be pretty fast for a scripting language. See eg. http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2005/jw-0314-scripting_p.html?page=9 (this performance has been improved since then). If you want to know, if the performance is good enough for you, try to use it. Create a class, scaffold a CRUD application and see it for yourself. It only takes a couple of minutes. And remember that the underlying libs are Hibernate with Caching, the Spring Controller etc., so the foundation is solid. Stephan Albers

is there any performance info available using grails? i've read the grails book and i like the look, just wondering how it would run.

I don't know any Grails performance tests yet. Overall I like the performance and it is good enough for us.

Grails is written in parts in Java and parts in Groovy. Groovy seems to be pretty fast for a scripting language. See eg.
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2005/jw-0314-scripting_p.html?page=9
(this performance has been improved since then).

If you want to know, if the performance is good enough for you, try to use it. Create a class, scaffold a CRUD application and see it for yourself. It only takes a couple of minutes. And remember that the underlying libs are Hibernate with Caching, the Spring Controller etc., so the foundation is solid.

Stephan Albers

Groovy isn't interpreted, even when run like a script. Groovy code is fully loaded and compiled to the same bytecode as Java. In a sense if you think of bytecode as the true language of the JVM then Groovy and Java end up equivalent. Groovy does probably use a lot of reflection under the covers so that could make it slightly slower, but SUN has over time made reflection much more efficient. Even if Groovy compiled down to 5 or 10 times the amount of bytecode instructions that probably wouldn't make a dent in the overall performance of an application. Servers are fast, the JVM hot spot technology is fast, and your bottlenecks will still be the network, the database, service calls, etc.