Grails 0.5.5/0.5.6 Release Notes

15 June 2007

The Grails development team has reached another milestone and is pleased to announce the release of version 0.5.5 of the Grails web-application development framework.

Grails is a dynamic web-application framework built in Java and Groovy, leveraging best of breed APIs from the J2EE sphere including Spring, Hibernate and SiteMesh. Grails brings to Java and Groovy developers the joys of convention-based rapid development while allowing them to leverage their existing knowledge and capitalize on the proven and performant APIs Java developers have been using for years.

Thank you to all the team members, patch contributors and users. A lot of hard work has gone into this release - we hope you enjoy using this latest installment of the Grails adventure.

New Features

• New Plug-in Distribution Mechanism
• New Plug-in auto-discovery and installation
• ExpandoMetaClass improvements to add methods onto interfaces (http://groovy.codehaus.org/ExpandoMetaClass)
• Re-worked Unit testing to support separate unit and integration testing
• Dependency Injection for domain classes
• Support for organising projects with standard Java/Groovy packaging

New Plug-in Distribution Mechanism

Plugin authors can now distribute their plugins simply by typing:

grails release-plugin

New Plug-in auto-discovery and installation

Typing

grails list-plugins

Plug-ins available in the Grails repository are listed below:
-------------------------------------------------------------
…
quartz              <0.1>               --      This plugin adds Quartz job scheduling features to Grails application.
radeox              <0.1>               --      A plugin for the Radeox Wiki-render engine to allow easy markup and cross-linking.
remoting            <0.2>               --      Adds easy-to-use server-side and client-side RPC support.
scaffoldtags        <no releases>       --      No description available
searchable          <0.3 (?)>           --      This is a zip release, no info available for it
staticresources     <no releases>       --      No description available
wicket              <0.3>               --      Provides integration between Grails and the Wicket framework
xfire               <no releases>       --      No description available
…
To find more info about plugin type 'grails plugin-info [NAME]'
To install type 'grails install-plugin [NAME] [VERSION]'
For further info visit http://grails.org/Plugins

ExpandoMetaClass improvements to add methods onto interfaces

See Groovy docs for info (http://groovy.codehaus.org/ExpandoMetaClass)

Re-worked Unit testing to support separate unit and integration testing

Tests are now split into fast running unit tests and integration tests that load the whole environment:

Individual tests can be run with {{grails test-app TEST_NAME}}. Full reports are output to test/reports:

Dependency Injection for domain classes

The default constructors for domain classes has been overriden to retrieve prototype beans from the application context which can take advantage of auto-wiring.

new Book() // dependent beans auto-wired automatically with new operator!