Last week, I described how Grails now treats plugins like normal dependencies that can be pulled from Maven-compatible repositories. Although this was the big new feature for 1.3, it wasn't the only one. In this post, I'll look at some of the others, starting with a feature that I only recently found out about.

Named queries

• dynamic finders, e.g. Book.findByTitleAndAuthorLike(...);
• criteria queries, which use a nice DSL; and
• HQL, Hibernate's SQL-like query language.

Develop a non-trivial Grails application and you will soon realise that you often use the same queries again and again. What should you do? The copy-and-paste technique is simple but leaves you with major maintenance issues. You could write service methods for each of your common…

I'm delighted to announce that we've just released Spring Roo 1.1.0.M1. Spring Roo is the fastest way for Java developers to build Spring-based applications in the Java programming language. With the Roo 1.1.0.M1 you can build working web applications - complete with a Google Web Toolkit (GWT) front end - in as little as 200 keystrokes! Plus as usual we've concurrently released a new version of SpringSource Tool Suite (STS 2.3.3.M1) which is optimised for the latest and greatest Roo goodies!

There are over 200 fixes, enhancements and new features since our 1.0.2 release three months ago. Some…

A few weeks ago I tweeted that—incredibly—SpringSource was executing faster within VMware than as a startup. Today we announce another exciting development bearing this out.

Following our VMforce partnership with SaaS leader salesforce.com, we are today announcing a collaboration between VMware and Google, centering around the Spring programming model and SpringSource IDE and RAD tooling. Today’s announcement makes Spring the preferred programming model for Google App Engine. This is a tremendous endorsement of Spring as the best and most portable programming model for Java and opens up a new deployment opportunity for Spring developers. The demo in today’s keynote at Google I/O showcased the results from months of collaboration between SpringSource and Google engineers—most of which benefits Spring developers, regardless of where they wish to…

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?

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.

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…

I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of Grails 1.3! Followers of Grails releases will recall that it has not been long since the last major release of Grails (Grails 1.2 was released in December), but given the need to get the latest and greatest version of Groovy in the hands of developers, Grails 1.3 can be seen as the Groovy 1.7 release. The Groovy team did a fantastic job in bringing all sorts of excellent new additions to the Groovy language such as annonymous inner/nested classes, an AST builder and power asserts (my personal favourite), all of which are now available in…

Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the availability of Spring Web Flow 2.1.0 M1.

Download | Change Log

This release is built on Spring 3.0.2, Spring Security 3.0.2, Tiles 2.1.2, and Portlet API 2.0. It features use of Spring EL as the default expression language as well as integration with the new type conversion and formatting system available in Spring 3.

The 2.1.0 release will have two milestones with the first release candidate scheduled for two weeks from today. Feedback and comments at this point are welcome.

Another week, another important announcement. The SpringSource division of VMware today announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone Systems, a leader in data grid technology.

This acquisition, like our recent acquisition of Rabbit Technologies, adds another crucial building block of private and public cloud to our middleware portfolio. Like Rabbit and SpringSource and VMware’s other products, GemStone technology is valuable in both today’s enterprise scenarios and tomorrow’s cloud world. The acquisition also adds an important middleware capability to our…

VMware and Salesforce today announced a partnership to build an enterprise Java cloud called VMforce. The announcement is understandably receiving a lot of attention in the wider industry context, but today I’d like to focus on the central role of SpringSource technology in the new platform and the unique and compelling benefits it brings developers in the Spring community.

What is VMforce?

Developing Spring Applications on VMforce

The STS/VMforce integration means that you can drag and drop applications to deploy them to the platform and take advantage of incremental redeployment to do rapid round trip development even though the platform is…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring Web Flow 2.0.9 is now available. Download | Reference Documentation | Change Log

This release includes a number of minor bug fixes, as well as an update to the version of Dojo that addresses a Dojo security vulnerability.

In addition to 2.0.x maintenance, the Web Flow project team is currently working on a 2.1 release that provides a current generation version of Web Flow that builds on Spring 3. At the same time, work is continuing towards the first 3.0 milestone for the next generation Web Flow. Watch for future announcements…