In case you missed the big news, Griffon 1.2.0 was released last Friday!
There are several features and fixes to be found in this release as the team has now moved to a 3 month (at least) release cycle as the core of the framework has pretty much stabilized itself. We're still planning some big features (like modularity, better dependency management, full Gradle support, etc) but those will come later. So what does this release bring, you ask?
First and foremost this release includes Groovy 2.0.6. That's right, you can now leverage static compilation and static type checking on your Groovy code. Secondly, there's a new set of commands at your disposal: list-templates, upload-release, wrapper and usage-stats. The last one is quite interesting as it's yet another way for you to help the Griffon team make the Griffon framework a much better tool. This command enables/disables collection of usage stats that can be sent to the Griffon team. Because we value your privacy this feature is disabled by default. You can enable it at anytime or disable it if you change your mind. Rest assured that all data collected will be used for the good of the framework (and it's fully anonymized) and will not be shared with 3rd parties.
Then there are the runtime features such as lifecycle methods on Services (like those we had on MVC members years ago); a sweet DSL for configuring Service properties; externalized configuration; a new event whenever a managed instance (such an MVC member or a Service) gets destroyed; ability to specify custom factories for all major components used by the Griffon runtime to assemble the application. The last two made it trivial to build a new plugin, theme, on which I'll dedicate another blog post soon. Speaking of plugins, there's a new breed of plugins that provide AST transformation support for both Groovy and Java source code (thanks to Project Lombok); you can check'em out by following the lombok tag.
Included in this release are revamped versions of the IntelliJ IDEA GDSL and Eclipse STS DSLD descriptors for both core and swing packages. Related to this category (tool support) I'm happy to announce the immediate availability of the Griffon plugin for Gradle. With this plugin you'll be able to adapt a Griffon project as a Gradle project, making it dead simple for it to participate in a multi-project build for example.
Keep on Groovying!
