Groovy & Grails: Gr8 without Pivotal

Couple of days back, we got to know about Pivotal deciding to end the sponsorship of Groovy and Grails project from 31st March 2015 through Guillaume Laforge’s blog post and Graeme Rocher’s post  Like many others in the community, news has taken us by quite some surprise.

Just to give everyone context, we are a Technology services company. As a company, we were born in 2008 with Groovy and Grails as our single focus area. In a way, we have grown together and reaped extremely rich rewards by placing our focus in these technologies. During this time, we have built 100+ applications, helped diverse organizations from Product startups to Fortune 100 companies across the globe in building a wide array of solutions using these technologies. We have a team of 100+ Software Developers working exclusively on Groovy and Grails and an extremely healthy pipeline of work our way. Since our start, we have diversified into multiple other technologies but like first love, we are extremely passionate Groovy and Grails ecosystem. Here are some of my thoughts about this development.

1. Groovy and/or Grails are being used by a diverse range of organizations across the globe for building sophisticated business applications. Some of the prominent names I am aware about includes prestigious names like Sky.com, JP Morgan Chase, Wired.com, United Health Group, Time Warner Cable and many more.  All these highly successful and very large organizations adapting these technologies are testimony of its maturity and flexibility.
2. We have an extremely active developer community which keeps adding new features, fixing reported bugs and pushing new releases at regular intervals. Since the 1.0 release of Grails 6+ years ago, more than 40 major, minor and point released have been made with a new release happening in less than 45 days on an average. This has helped it’s users immensely in getting new features and problem resolutions. We are eagerly awaiting for the release of Grails 3.0 and Groovy 2.4 slated to happen in less than 2 months from now.
3. Similar to the developer community, we have very active and ever-growing user community. 4 Million+ Groovy downloads in 2014 and 800K Grails downloads makes each of them front leaders in language and frameworks in JVM ecosystem. Numerous conferences and meet-ups are held across the globe and throughout the year. We ourselves have been attending SpringOne2GX, Gr8 Conf and Groovy & Grails Exchange for past 4 years and have seen very popular and enthusiastic response across all of them. Coincidentally, we ourselves organized  the second edition of the conference around Groovy and Grails ecosystem couple of weeks ago and it was attended by well over 160+ people with diverse backgrounds. More details about the conference are available here.
4. The leadership team behind the language is really awesome. Ken has shared these sentiments very aptly in his blog The core team has always been available and ready to help. Not only have they been providing us a great language and a productive framework, they have also been of immense help to people who have hit roadblocks on the way.
5. Groovy as a language has been around for more than a decade. Though its original influence was Ruby, not only has it carved a niche for itself, but also given birth to a lot of frameworks/tools around it like Geb, Spock, Gradle, Griffon. There is a large developer community who may not be directly using Grails, but are still reaping the significant benefits of this large eco-system.
6. Lots of books have been written by very influential S/W architects on both Groovy and Grails. Programming Groovy, Groovy Recipes and Definitive Guide to Grails are just a few examples. Again a very concrete sign of the large number of people interested to know and learn more about the ecosystem.

Throughout its journey, Groovy and Grails have been supported first by SpringSource and then Pivotal at different stages and we sincerely thank them for their contribution. But at the same time, we believe it is simply too large and mature an ecosystem to be dependent on an organisation’s support. We have no doubt about them finding a new, bigger and even cosier home soon 🙂

Thanks a lot to everyone for giving us such a wonderful set of technologies and from our side, IntelliGrape will continue to do our bit in making this ecosystem broader and stronger.