Grails Project Proposal

Grails is a powerful Groovy-based full-stack web application framework for the JVM built on top of Spring Boot.

Grails is a full-stack web application framework for the JVM. It is intended to be a high-productivity framework by following the "convention over configuration" paradigm, providing a stand-alone development environment and hiding much of the configuration detail from the developer. Grails has long been developed under an Apache License v2.0 under an open governance community management process.

So far Grails has been a project mostly sponsored by a single company. It has become clear that the single vendor backed model previously used by Grails isn’t the best strategy to take it forward. We propose to bring the Grails community under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation with an initial goal that Grails core and its critical plugins are brought into the ASF (see more details in the “Initial Goals” section). We propose that the Groovy project act as the sponsoring organization during “incubation”. It will be responsible for mentoring community members and helping with releases until such time as Grails is ready to become a top-level project.

Grails is a mature open source project. Work began in July 2005, with the 0.1 release on March 29, 2006, and the 1.0 release announced on February 18, 2008. Recent releases include 6.2.3 (Jan 2025) and pre-release 7.0.0-M1 (Dec 2024) . After 19 years of development, Grails has grown into a powerful web application framework which leverages many of the latest technologies for building web applications on the JVM.

Numerous vendors have consulting businesses based on building web applications using Grails. Other organizations use Grails for their internal web application development. While the Grails community is large, the project itself is also large. The existing model of expecting a single vendor to do the bulk of its maintenance is no longer viable. Moving to the ASF provides a vendor neutral home where all community members can feel safe contributing to Grails.

Many modern web frameworks in the Java space are more complicated than needed and don’t embrace the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principles. Dynamic frameworks like Rails and Django helped pave the way to a more modern way of thinking about web applications. Grails builds on these concepts and dramatically reduces the complexity of building web applications on the Java platform. What makes it different, however, is that it does so by building on already established Java technologies.

The initial goals of the Grails transition to the ASF are:

Currently, Grails provides a fully functional implementation licensed under ALv2. The project home is at https://grails.org/ and the majority of development is coordinated under various repos on GitHub at https://github.com/grails/. The project sports a very mature documentation and ecosystem of projects leveraging it.

Grails, up to now, has been run by a few core project members with a lot of contributions coming from a wide community of participants in the project. We want to expand our diverse developer and user community and run the Grails project in the Apache way clearly signaling not only the licensing, but also the governance choice.

Users and new contributors will be treated with respect and welcomed; they will earn merit in the project by providing quality patches and support that move the project forward. Those with a proven support and quality patch track record will be encouraged to become committers.

There are just a few core team members with over a hundred contributors to the project. If Grails is accepted into the ASF, transitioning the community to embrace the Apache Way of governance would be a primary initial goal. We would solicit major existing contributors to become committers on the project from the get go.

Core developers include folks who are extremely skilled in working in the openly governed communities on code bases licensed under the ALv2. The core developers are NOT currently affiliated with the ASF, although quite a few contributors are.

Grails is highly aligned with the Groovy project with many of the DSLs used within Grails being drivers for the requirements of DSL support within Groovy. The Groovy subproject Geb is often used for testing with Grails and Grails provides special Geb support. Grails also makes use of about a dozen ASF artifacts from other ASF projects (commons, logging, etc.)

As noted above, development has been sponsored mostly by a single company and coordinated mostly by the core team so far. For Grails to fully transition to an "Apache Way" governance model it needs to start embracing the meritocracy-centric way of growing the community of contributors while balancing it with the needs for extreme stability and coherency of the core implementation.

The community proposing Grails for incubation is an active open source community. The primary vendor until now has been Object Computing (and for about a year, a related spin-off Unity Foundation). Currently Object Computing has paused significant new investment in the Grails project, but the size and diversity of the community should guarantee against the project being orphaned.

The majority of the proposers have day jobs that have them working near full-time on open source projects. Grails to date has always been developed as an open source project.

Now that Object Computing is pausing significant new investment, the initial group of committers is expected to be heterogeneous when it comes to corporate affiliations. The Grails community is also extremely diverse in terms of geography and backgrounds of developers.

Most of the contributors are paid to work in the Java ecosystem. While we might wander from our current employers, we probably won’t go far from the Java family tree.

Grails relies fundamentally on Apache Groovy. It also depends on a number of other ASF projects including commons, ant, tomcat, and maven. Various Grails plugins (many are optional) also have ASF projects as dependencies.

While we think that the Apache ‘branding’ will add strength to our project’s desire for ‘neutrality’, we have no plans for making excessive use of the Apache brand.

See https://docs.grails.org/6.2.0/guide/single.html for the current state of the Grails documentation. A mature project website is also available at https://grails.org/.

Initial source is available on GitHub under the ALv2

Paul King

Paul King Søren Berg Glasius

We would like to propose the Groovy project to sponsor the incubation of Grails.