Let’s upgrade existing plugins to Grails3

Now that Grails 3, the most anticipated release of Grails is out, which comes with lot of new features like:

• Gradle Build System.
• Notion of application profiles.
• Redesigned API based on Traits.
• New shell & Code generation API.
• Build in support for Spock/Geb functional tests.
• Gradle Test Running etc.

The Grails core team always maintained that this would be the re-defining Grails version. A lot of Grails internals have been re-written. This is a great thing for the framework itself, but it also surfaces a lot of concerns for the “Grails Users”. Some of them are:

• How will I be able to migrate my existing Grails app?
• Does it bring any changes to how we use Grails?
• What happens to the existing plugins and how will they be migrated to 3.x version?

A lot of these concerns are well founded as the core team has mentioned on numerous occasions that they are not holding themselves back by backward compatibility. That in itself is a big decision but we have to say that it is a correct one as well if Grails has to maintain its glory.

When it comes to Grails, one of it’s biggest strength is it’s plugin repository. However, with 3.x, most of the plugins have become unusable(remember no backward compatibility). This is where we, the Grails community need to play a solid role and contribute. We at TTN Digital (erstwhile Intelligrape) are taking this responsibility very seriously and trying to pay back to the great framework and the community behind it.

We started working on migration of existing Grails plugins to the latest version(Grails 3). So far we’ve migrated 3 plugins:

• grails-asynchronous-mail
• grails-export
• grails-clojure

Also, I would like to commend that docs are very helpful. It’s very easy to migrate existing plugins by following Grails Docs: Upgrading Plugins

We are currently working on few more plugins and will keep sharing our experience.