For a long time, managing Grails dependencies simply meant putting them in your application's lib directory. Then came Grails 1.2 and the dependency DSL: you could finally declare your dependencies and have Grails automatically download them and make them available to your app. Great!

Now, Grails 1.3 has brought the dependency DSL to the realm of plugins.

So what?

Users have often faced two issues with the plugin system up till now:

1. setting up a suitable Subversion server to act as a Grails plugin repository is not simple; and
2. you can't control what dependencies a plugin brings into your application.

The first of these doesn't particularly apply to individual developers, but it's a bigger deal for companies where access to the internet may be restricted or where they want more control over the "latest" versions of libraries and plugins. How much better it would be if they could use a repository manager like Nexus or Artifactory.

As for the dependencies, some plugins include libraries you don't need or (even worse) break your application. With the dependency DSL, you can explicitly exclude problematic libraries.

Those are some of the reasons why this change might be…