Grails 1.0.3 Release Notes

6th of June 2008

G2One Inc - The Groovy/Grails company - and the Grails development team are pleased to announce the 1.0.3 release of the Grails web application development framework.

Grails is a dynamic web application framework built on Java and Groovy, leveraging best of breed APIs from the Java EE 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.

Since the release of Grails 1.0, Grails has been downloaded a staggering 186000 times averaging out to around 50000 times per month putting it up there with the most popular open source Java projects. The plug-in community has grown rapidly with over 70 plug-ins being developed that add new features from security to RIA to web services.

Further information about the release can be obtained using the links below:

Changelog: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GRAILS?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project:changelog-panel
Download: http://grails.org/Download
Documentation: http://grails.org/doc/1.0.3

New features in 1.0.3 are described below.

New Features

As a point release Grails 1.0.3 mainly contains improvements and bug fixes, but there are a few new features to explore.

Interactive Mode

An experimental feature in this release, interactive mode lets you load up Grails command line interface and keep it running simply by typing:

grails interactive

The advantage here is you don't suffer the additional JVM start-up cost and the JVM can start to inline code resulting in the ability to run the commands faster. This is particularly advantageous for testing with the unit tests running much quicker than before

Enum support in GORM

GORM now supports JDK 1.5 enums which allows for type safe, enumerated types. For example:

enum VehicleStatus { OFF, IDLING, ACCELERATING, DECELARATING }class Vehicle {
    Long id
    Long version
    VehicleStatus status
}

I18n URL mappings

You can now use URL mappings to map URLs onto particular languages extending Grails i18n support. For example:

"/german/$controller/$action" {
     lang = "de"
}

Upgrade notes

To upgrade simply run the upgrade command:

grails upgrade

Further notes:

The default cache provider for development has been changed to OSCache, for production the cache provider remains Ehcache
Users of the WebTest Plugin will need to upgrade to version 0.5 of the plug-in