Technology Advisory Board Meeting, March 23, 2022
Meeting Attendance:
- Puneet Behl - Grails Product Development Lead at Object Computing
- David Estes - Co-founder and VP of Engineering at Morpheus Data; Creator of the Grails Asset-Pipeline
- Søren Glasius – Architect and Technical Manager at Gennemtænkt IT
- James Kleeh - Micronaut Product Development Lead at Object Computing
- Ken Kousen – President at Kousen IT, Inc.
- Jason Schindler – Partner and Groovy, Grails, and Micronaut Team Manager at Object Computing
- Jen Wiese - Object Computing, OSS Community Engagement Manager
- Tabitha Willan – Lead Application Engineer at Omaha Public Power District
Not in Attendance:
- Graeme Rocher - Grails co-founder; Architect at Oracle
- Paul King – Groovy Project Development Lead at Object Computing
The Meeting Was Led By: Jen Wiese
Agenda:
- Welcome and Introduction of New Members
- Review Goals
- Review Internal Communication Channels
- Community Updates
- Sponsorship Update
- Product Strategy
- Grails Updates
- Tech Talk
- Open Discussion
- Close Meeting
Welcome and Introduction of New Members
- New TAB Members: Ken, Tabitha, and Søren
Review Goals
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Foundation Goals
- Ensure technical innovation and advancement of the Grails framework as a free and open public use software development framework for a growing global community
- Evangelize and promote the Grails framework as a leading technology in the JVM space
- Build and support an ecosystem of complementary documentation, functionality, and services
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Technology Advisory Board Goals
- Provide input to help guide the direction of the Framework
- Represent perspectives from various areas of the industry
- Ensure the Framework continues to reflect and serve its diverse and growing user community
- Your insights are a significant part of why the foundation exists!
Review Internal Communication Channels
* Feel free to send in topics to discuss prior to meeting; all input and ideas are welcome
* We want to capitalize on the group of folks we have here, so please reach out
* Plan to meet at least once per quarter
Community Updates
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Evangelism and Advocacy Goals
- 3 Training events
- 2 Webinars
- 2 Meetups
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Q1 Training Delivered to Date
- Introduction to Grails Security
- Using Micronaut Features in a Grails Application
Sponsorship Update
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Tools and Infrastructure Partners
- Gradle
- JetBrains
- Ideas for others …
- JFrog
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- OCI
- Anonymous Donor
- Ideas for others …
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- Ongoing
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Please let us know if there is anyone that would like to learn more about the Grails Foundation and how they can support the Framework and become a corporate sponsor. As a not-for-profit organization, the Grails Foundation relies on the financial support from our amazing community of generous sponsors.
Product Strategy (Grails & Micronaut)
- Focus on Grails improvements to make it easier for users to take advantage of Micronaut Modules and features in their Grails applications
- Experiment with the Micronaut Servlet runtime in Grails applications
- Identify plugins that can be replaced with Micronaut Modules
- Evaluate the future of Spring Boot and what the JDK switch will mean (if anything) for the future of the Grails framework
Grails Updates
- Grails 5.1.1 (20 December)
- Grails Database Migration 4.0.0-RC3
- Spring Security Core Plugin
- Leveling-up Grails CLI
- Consolidating Grails Plugin from different Github repos
- Spring Loaded work has been ongoing to support JDK 11
- It works for most projects now but large projects have issues
- David Estes is working on determining the cause of that now
Tech Talk
- Discussion on JDK Version for Grails 6
- Ken: Has there been a plan on the move to JDK 11 and JDK 17 in accordance with the Spring change?
- David: Yes and no
- Jason: There was some discussion last time about this, and it is worth bringing up again. The question is what is the appetite from the community on the support for the latest Spring Boot, which will require the JDK 17 baseline. I support having a Grails 6 release with Groovy 4, but supporting the current major version of Spring Boot instead of jumping to JDK 17 all at once
- Søren: From the perspective of a customer, they have been going through all of the work from Grails 2 to 4; they are scared of something big coming again. Going through smaller increments seems to be a benefit
- James: I would consider sticking to Java 8 for Grails 6
- David: I think that could be a problem because 8 is out of support and a lot of libraries are switching to a baseline of 11
- Ken: So what are you suggesting?
- James: I think there are benefits to sticking with 8 mainly in that there are a lot of organizations that are still using Java 8, and I don’t think switching to 11 brings any large benefits to the framework
- David: Asset Pipeline will be baselined to Java 11, so if the latest version of that will remain with Grails it will need to be updated. Also 8 is going out of support
- Ken: I think by the end of the year, 11 will be the dominant version
- Tabitha: I think we should be moving up. We are trying to move off of 8 for some of the support reasons mentioned
- James: The rationale for continuing to support it would be that there are a lot of people that are stuck on 8
- Tabitha: If we do maintain 8, what is going to be the level of effort to maintain that to those customers
- Søren: From my point of view, if Grails 6 were to be Java 11, that would pull major customers out of JDK 8
- David: I think people in education and government will be forced to move to 11
- Puneet: Maybe we could stick with 8 for now and put this off a few months and see where we are at in terms of 11
- Ken: I think if we stay on 8, it looks like we aren’t keeping up or updating anything
- James: I don’t think there is a lot in 11 that benefits the framework while there are a lot of benefits in 17
- David: I’m going to need to switch asset pipeline to 11 either way in order to support newer ECMA Script features. I can support the older version for a while, but it needs to move
- Polled the group for advice on if Grails 6 should baseline on JDK 8 or 11
- Ken: 11
- Tabitha: 11
- Søren: 11
- David: 11
- James: 8
- Jason: 11
- Puneet: 8
- Ken: I primarily do training and it has been a long time since folks have asked for a Grails training class. I’m concerned that if we don’t keep current, we are giving the impression that we aren’t keeping up
- David: I’ve noticed that when we say that people can write a Groovy module for our product that some people get excited about that but some others wonder why it isn’t Python or some other language
- David: Also, Rails had a period where interest wasn’t as high, and now they are really popular again in the Ruby community, so we could see what sort of things they did
Open Discussion
- Meeting notes will be published
- Thank you to everyone who attended. Your participation and time are very much appreciated