Spring, Groovy, and Grails Closing 2009 With a Bang

It appears that the folks at SpringSouce have been hard at work, and are giving Groovy and Grails folks a lot to look forward to in 2010. Let me give you a quick recap of the past week or so and just highlight some of the recent events.

It started last week with two Groovy related announcements. First, we were treated to Groovy 1.7 RC2 and found out that we have every reason to expect Groovy 1.7 GA before Christmas.

See: Groovy 1.7-RC-2 out there

Also, last week the Groovy-Eclipse team quietly released 2.0M2 of the Groovy Eclipse plug-in. They claim to have addressed over 100 issues, which includes a better inference engine, better refactoring support, task tag support, and content assist in GStrings. All in all, it looks like some nice improvements.

See: Groovy-Eclipse 2.0.0M2 New and Noteworthy

Then today there was an explosion of news all starting with the release of Spring Framework 3.0. There is a lot of good new stuff in there, and I’ll leave it to Juergen Hoeller to lay it all out for you.

See: Spring Framework 3.0 goes GA

This was followed very closely with the release of Grails 1.2 RC2 which includes the new Spring Framework 3.0 GA.

See: Grails 1.2-RC2 Release Notes

Finally, Guillaume Laforge posted an update on the modularity work that is being done as part of the Groovy 1.8 effort. This gist of this is to modularize Groovy into smaller pieces rather than having one, large groovy-all.jar distribution. Part of this effort will include replacing the current Ant based build with Gradle. This is a nice feather in the cap for Gradle.

See: Groovy 1.8 modularization

I am very excited to see what is to come in 2010 for the Groovy and Grails community. Judging by the activities of just the past month, there is a lot to be excited about for the year to come.