SpringSource Acquisition of G2One Inc.

Frequently Asked Questions
November 2008

Who is G2One?
G2One Inc. (www.g2one.com ) is the company behind the popular Groovy and Grails technologies.  G2One was founded by the Groovy and Grails leads, Guillaume Laforge and Graeme Rocher, and by Alex Tkachman in 2007.  

What is Groovy?
Groovy is an open source dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine, that offers a flexible Java-like syntax all Java developers can learn in matter of hours, and provides features seen in other dynamic languages like Ruby, Python or Smalltalk. Groovy lets you leverage and protect your investments in developer skills, tooling or server software, while still allowing the creation of innovative software or business knowledge assets in the form of Domain-Specific Languages.

What is Grails?
Grails is an Open Source advanced and innovative Web-application framework based on Groovy, and built on proven and high performance open source platforms such as Spring, Hibernate, SiteMesh, Quartz, and Ajax libraries. It has been downloaded millions of times, enabling IT teams to establish fast development cycles through agile methodologies, to deliver quality applications in reduced amounts of time by applying principles like Convention over Configuration to simplify the development tasks and focusing on what really matters: the business of your users and the ease of use of the application you will deliver to them.

Who should use Grails?
Java teams looking to obtain the productivity benefits of frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django (Python), whilst still leveraging their existing Java skills, tooling and deployment environment.

What are Groovy and Grails primarily used for?
Being a general purpose programming language, Groovy has a wide range of uses. However, Groovy’s strength really shows in its ability to easily define internal Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Many organizations have adopted Groovy as an abstraction layer for defining business rules using DSLs. Grails is a web framework that is used in a variety of contexts from early stage pro-totyping, to being the platform that organizations base their entire web infrastructure on. Grails is particularly appropriate for building content-centric web applications such as custom Content Management Systems (CMS).

Why is SpringSource Acquiring G2One?
Lately, the resurgence of dynamic languages, and innovative Web frameworks based on these lan-guages, have changed the landscape drastically by offering more powerful and more efficient ways to develop business applications. Groovy, Grails, and open source projects like Spring, have changed the Java ecosystem by increasing productivity and speeding the development of mission-critical applications. It’s a natural fit and part of SpringSource’s mission to take enterprise Java to the next level and create a complete enterprise Java stack.

With the acquisition of G2One, SpringSource will now offer global enterprise support offerings around Groovy and Grails.  

Why should one choose Grails instead of Ruby on Rails (RoR)?
Ruby on Rails showed how frameworks based on simple principles can dramatically improve developer productivity, creativity, and lowered maintenance costs.  Grails has significantly improved upon those principles and brought the productivity of Rails to the de-facto enterprise Java stack, which is based on Spring.  Grails adds essential enterprise features like transaction demarcation support, conversational state, and appropriate object to relational mapping for legacy systems, without compromising on the deployment aspects and by protecting the investments made in server software and developer skills.

What does this acquisition mean for SpringSource Customers?
SpringSource customers that are looking to use dynamic languages or are interested in simpler enterprise Java development by using an abstraction layer or Domain Specific Languages, now have an option that provides global enterprise support.  

What does the acquisition mean for the Spring Community?
The Spring community will, for the first time, have access to a dynamic language (Groovy) and platform (Grails) that is led and sustained by the same company they trust to deliver Spring, the premier enterprise Java framework.

In addition, with the Grails team now part of SpringSource, the Spring community will benefit from cross-pollination between the Spring MVC, Web Flow and Grails teams as SpringSource continues to deliver a wide range of solutions for differing requirements.

What does this acquisition mean for G2One customers?
SpringSource has built a global support and governance operation for the Spring Framework. This infrastructure, coupled with G2One’s experts and some investment, can deliver a 24x7, worldwide support network for enterprises investing heavily in Groovy and Grails. Additionally, there will be some immediate product enhancements and we will be investigating the creation of enterprise grade Eclipse tools for Groovy and Grails development.

What does this acquisition mean for the Groovy and Grails Communities?
For Groovy, SpringSource will bring their significant experience in working with community-led projects like Apache Tomcat, to Groovy. SpringSource will continue the investment already made by G2One in advancing Groovy towards the goals outlined in Groovy’s development roadmap.

For Grails, SpringSource will invest significant resources to the continue development and improvement to the framework. With the SpringSource core development team and the Grails expertise brought by G2One, Grails will benefit from tighter integration with the Spring framework.

In addition, SpringSource’s tools development team will work to add Eclipse support, delivering a world-class user experience for Groovy and Grails users.

Will you change the licensing models for Groovy or Grails?
No. Both will continue to be released under Apache licenses.

Will you introduce maintenance policies like the ones recently unveiled for Spring?
SpringSource always tries to strike a balance between keeping productivity enhancing projects available to the community as broadly as possible and funding the development of new innovations for the projects.  We will not change release practices for Groovy.  Since future releases of Grails are likely to be delivered alongside Spring, we may use the same maintenance policy Grails as we have in place for Spring.  This policy, which was revised based on community feedback, has been widely embraced by the open source community.  We will work closely with the Grails community on any changes.