I just saw the release notes on Grails and man am I excited! I recently started with Groovy and am just now getting my head wrapped around Grails. A perfect time for a new release. In case you are not familiar with Grails:

“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.”

• Standalone GORM for non-Grails projects
• Ant+Ivy and Maven support so you can build Grails with two of the most popular Java builds tools
• New test framework so you can plugin a mock/unit testing framework for Grails
• Enhanced plugin support for transitive plugin resolution, global plugins, in-place plugins and much more
• JSP tag library support so you can now use your favorite JSP taglibs
• Controller imporvements for handling of double-submits, forwards and includes and declarative exception handling

You can download Grails here so get started!

I’ve been messing around with Groovy for a few months and am beginning to really like it’s structure and syntax. If you haven’t looked at Groovy yet, here’s a good article on why you should.