SpringSource release train delivers Grails 1.2

The SpringSource developers have released version 1.2 of Grails, the web application framework built on Java and Groovy, following on the release train which has seen final versions Spring 3 and Groovy 1.7 released in recent weeks. Graeme Rocher, Grails developer, noted that the release has benefitted not only from community contributions but from the collaboration of the teams at SpringSource who work on Spring, Tomcat and Groovy saying "Having all that knowledge under one roof has helped at every stage of the project life cycle".

The new release of the framework has a number of new features beyond the obligatory bug fixes. Highlights of the release include a dependency resolution DSL that allows for resolution against Maven repositories, improved URI rewriting, per-method transactions, named queries and pre-compilation of Groovy Server Pages (GSP). Groovy 1.7 also offers major performance improvements in the rendering of GSP and Sitemesh with two to three times better throughput according to the developers.

Other improvements include the better dynamic finders for boolean properties, global configuration of defaults for the GORM (Grail's Object Relational Manager), support for the hasOne database mapping, improved internationalisation, pluggable embedded web containers and an enhanced JSONBuilder. The developers note that the JSONBuilder enhancements will break backwards compatibility and have added a setting to enable a legacy version of the builder. Full details of all the changes are available in the release notes. The Apache 2.0 licensed Grails 1.2 is available to download along with online documentation.

(djwm)