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