Griffon just tuned 5 this past Tuesday (September 10th)! And what best way to celebrate than to make a release of the latest version: Griffon 1.4.0.
as some of you may know the first release of Griffon (version 0.0, you can read Danno's original post here) was published back in September 10 2008. It's been a long and fun journey. The framework has grown from being a Grails clone (sans servlet & HTML) to be a beast (pun intended) of its own. Not only did Griffon grow from the Grails codebase, in time it also contributed back to it, in form of small patches targeting the build system and cross-pollinating plugins.
To be honest we didn't have any idea of what was to become of Griffon when Danno, James, Guillaume and myself came up with the idea back in May '08, yet here we are, stronger than ever and with continued growth. Griffon has been put to good use in 87 countries around the world; the central plugin repository holds 219 plugins by my last reckoning; Griffon grew out of Swing and embraced other UI toolkits (JavaFX and SWT at first, then Qt and Pivot) and finally Lanterna; Groovy and Java are not the only languages that can be used to build applications (Scala, Clojure, Kotlin and more, take your pick). Not to mention that we also got a book published.
All in all it has been a good 5 years, and the response from the community has been great! We couldn't have done it without your feedback. Here's to the next 5 years, because as long as there's the need to write desktop applications on the JVM, Griffon will be there to see that the job get's done 
Keep on Groovying!
