Future of Grails

1. The Future of Grails Dan Woods ! @danveloper

2. Where Did Grails Really Shine?

3. Agile Development ! • Development-ﬁrst experience ! • Brought hot-reloading to enterprise development ! • Seamless transition from "old guard" ! • Rapid prototyping of concepts ! • Groovy!

4. Sensible Autowirings ! • Bringing all the platform components together, with no effort ! • Driving autowirings through conﬁguration ! • GORM -- Easy to employ DDD while maintaining an anemic model ! • BootStrap.groovy ... Such an undervalued premise

5. "Smart" Convention over Conﬁguration ! • Encourages a common (and good!) architecture for all Grails apps ! • Taking MVC to the next level ! • "Right place at the right time with the right name" artifact generation

6. A Build System for the Web ! • Trail blazed the programmatic build system, even before Gradle ! • Completely deterministic build lifecycle ! • The basis for all Grails scripts and lifecycle events, supporting core extensions

7. Makes the Fun Things Easy ! • Grails put Spring, Hibernate, and Groovy into a warp conduit! ! • Bringing together desperate tech communities under a common umbrella (and way of doing things) ! • Built infrastructure around other frameworks, making them sensible and easy-to-use

8. "Convention over conﬁguration, taken too far, doesn't let you wire things together" ! - Luke Daley

9. Where has Grails Suffered the Most?

10. Black Magic ! • Mysterious code generation ! • Runtime MetaClass extensions that cause non- deterministic dispatching ! • A "Stringly" typed framework... ! • Goldilocks Groovy -- Grails porridge is a bit too hot

11. Too Far From The Source ! • Debugging issues within an incorporated framework can be really hard ! • Stacktraces rarely would reveal the root of the problem (this has gotten much better) ! • Impossible to ascertain the various sources inﬂuencing behavior

12. Bulky & Fat ! • Wiring everything together means that everything must be present ! • Produces mega artifacts -- WAR by design, JAR by option (thanks, Burt) ! • Not a good candidate for running in PaaS/cloud infrastructure

13. Let's build a plugin framework... ! • ... and let's let any unknown number of sources impact my: app lifecycle; request; development experience; ! • Introduces high levels of complexity to every execution cycle ! • Binary plugins: and now we're going to let plugins hide their source ! • Really messes up an otherwise sound architecture

14. "Who the f*%k chose Spring?" ! - Rob Fletcher, recent HipChat conversation

15. Grails 3

16. A Paradigm Shift in Grails... ! • Grails 3 will take on a library approach as a framework ! • No more (or limited) code generation ! • Builds will happen through Gradle, using Gradle plugins ... Limited magic

17. The Good Parts Will Stay... ! • The core concept of convention over conﬁguration ! • The sensible incorporation, and wiring together, of best-in-breed frameworks ! • Agile development experience will remain a paramount goal

18. The Best is Yet To Come... ! • Grails 3 will make the framework composable -- pick and choose functionality you need ! • Introducing "Application Proﬁles" -- a strategy for grouping goal-oriented features of the framework ! • Improved performance -- Performance Legend, Lari Hotari now a core team member ! • Probably see greater adoption of Groovy in the core

19. Spring Boot ! • Grails 3 will be built on top of Spring Boot ! • Brings the continental Spring ecosystem, and integration points ! • Will add common structure and reduce verbosity of Spring Boot applications, while garnering all the beneﬁts

20. Migrating from Grails 2.x to 3.x ! • There's no migration path here... This is a whole new way of doing things ! • That includes plugins... It's unclear what the plugin story is for Grails 3 -- likely libraries with lifecycle hooks

21. How are we doing things...?

22. Spring Boot ! • Early adopters of Spring Boot ! • Getting a jump start on ﬁguring out the pain points of Boot integration ! • Communicating openly and frequently with the core team at Pivotal ! • Building our own infrastructure around Spring Boot technologies

23. Asgard ! ! The next evolution of Asgard will be a microservice PaaS built on top of Spring Boot

24. Don't get too wrapped up... ! • Designed our PaaS without framework lock-in ! • Very much designing for ways that we can evolve as new technologies (like Grails 3) emerge ! • Hoping our experiences with Boot will beneﬁt the Grails community

25. Come work with us... We need your help! jobs.netﬂix.com