Today we are pleased to announce the release of Grails 2.4. This is the final release in the 2.x line of releases and includes a number of significant updates.

Most importantly Grails 2.4.x ships with key pieces of the Spring IO platform, including Groovy 2.3 and Spring 4.0.5.

Release Highlights

In addition to the inclusion of the latest versions of Spring and Groovy there are a number of key new features in this release, including:

• Standalone GORM & GSP - Yes, GORM for Hibernate 4 and GORM for MongoDB can both be used outside of Grails in a Spring Boot application or Groovy script.
• Static Compilation - Using extensions to Groovy's static compilation features, it is now possible to statically compile many interactions with the Grails framework, including dynamic finders.
• Asset Pipeline Plugin - Grails 2.4 replaces the previous Resources plugin with the new Asset Pipeline plugin for managing static assets (CSS, JavaScript etc.).
• GORM Subqueries - GORM has been enhanced, with extensive support for correlated subqueries.
• New Maven Plugin - The Maven plugin has been rewritten to use Aether for dependency resolution and now works with multiple versions of Grails.

There is a more comprehensive guide to all the new features available on the Grails website.

Grails 3.0

The focus of our work now shifts to Grails 3.0, which will be a reimagination of the framework you know and love.

Grails 3.0 will be based on Spring Boot, feature advanced Gradle support and the ability to build a range of application types from Micro services to traditional web applications.

We would love to hear your feedback on the release. To report issues head over to JIRA and to join the discussion checkout our new Google Group or post questions on Stack Overflow.

Cheers, Graeme