Grails 2.0 with more cloud support and NoSQL connectivity

After nearly a year of development, the Grails team has released Grails version 2.0, their Groovy language based open source web framework. The new version sees improvements throughout the Grails framework including an improved user and developer experience, additional cloud support via Heroku and Cloud Foundry, integration with the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) and support for a range of NoSQL databases.

Graeme Rocher, head of Grails development at SpringSource, gives a broad overview of the changes in the new version on the company blog. For developers, there are now updates to the latest versions of Groovy (1.8), Spring (3.1), Hibernate (3.6) and Servlet (3.0) libraries, an improved class reloading system, a new framework for working with static resources such as CSS and JavaScript, and new APIs for link generation and page rendering.

New functionality in the Grails-Object-Relational-Mapper (GORM), specifically a plugin system, allows for the integration of NoSQL databases including MongoDB, Redis and Riak, while adding support for multiple data sources and an enhanced query syntax.There are also major improvements to the process of database migration, with a new migration plugin whose functionality is also available to Grails 1.3 users. A 48 minute webinar presents more detail on the enhancements of Grails 2.0.

Peter Ledbrook: What's new in Grails 2.0

The Grails team reports that it has fixed more than 900 issues from the bug tracking system in Grails 2.0 and, by switching to using Gradle as its build tool, has made major progress in modularising the Grails source code. The Grails framework is available to download from grails.org and is licensed under the Apache Licence 2.0.

(djwm)