Grails 0.4 hit the street today.  And now that the world has officially yawned at Vista, we need something a bit more interesting to get into.  Don't you think?  Queue Grails 0.4.  It's a solid release with numerous enhancements and new-found extensibility.  Check out the official release notes for full details, but here are a few of the heavy hitters…

• Rockin' New Plug-in System - Grails is now easily extensible thanks to the new plug-in system.  Can't wait for the dev team to implement the feature you want?  Write it as a plug-in, and make it available for others to enjoy as well.  We've seen what extensibility can do for software these days, and we've already seen some impressive Grails plug-ins come to life.  Even before today's official release of Grails 0.4, a few ambitious early adopters have kindly contributed an XFire plugin (for easily exposing Grails service classes as web services) and an OpenLaszlo plugin (for building Rich Internet Applications [RIAs] with Grails).

• Improved JEE container support - With this release, Grails now runs well on GlassFish.  (If you're interested in seeing a quick concept app using Grails and GlassFish, check out Glen Smith's Groogle experiment, which integrates Grails with Lucene.)
  

• Over 200 enhancements and bug fixes! - This laundry list of improvements includes everything from automatic encoding of unsafe HTML characters - Automatic!  Excellent! - to more reliable resource reloading when running in development mode - Ahhh…Productivity!
  

Download away, and enjoy!

The slides from my presentation on Grails at the Philadelphia Spring Users Group are now available at…

http://jasonrudolph.com/resources/20070123PSUGGettingStartedwith_Grails.pdf 

Enjoy!

InfoQ has just released my new book, Getting Started with Grails, and it's available as a free download for you to digg into and find out what Grails is all about.  The book walks you through building a Grails app from scratch, and introduces various Grails features over the course of several iterative development cycles.  So, download the book, grab the sample code, and enjoy!

It was a sincere pleasure to work with the many talented reviewers that helped out on this book.  I hope you find this book helpful, and please feel free drop me a line with any feedback or post a comment below.  Groove on!

If you'll be in the Philadelphia area on January 23rd, the Philadelphia Spring Users Group is hosting a presentation on Groovy and Grails that you won't want to miss.   Thomas Risberg (Spring committer) will discuss the benefits of integrating Groovy beans with Spring MVC, and I'll be presenting an introduction to Grails.  I'll also have free Groovy and Grails books to give away.  I'll be handing out several copies of both The Definitive Guide to Grails (by Graeme Rocher) and Groovy in Action (by Dierk Koening, et al).  If you're in the area, reserve your spot, and come check out two of the the Java platform's most exciting up-and-coming technologies.   

Many thanks to Apress and Manning for their kind support.