Not the news I would like to share but it is what ...
# questions
g
Not the news I would like to share but it is what it is. Grails has gone through this before and was picked up, but I don't know if the same thing will happen or if the Grails/Unity foundations will get more funding for the project or not. https://objectcomputing.com/resources/news/2024/05/10/open-letter-our-open-source-communities
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g
I do wish Object Computing had reached out to the community first to see if they could get some support for the foundation directly (including to say transfer Puneet to the Unity Foundation), but I doubt it would have changed their decision to pull back on Grails support.
g
Yeah while I still think Grails is one of the best frameworks out there, unfortunately, its popularity has been on a downward slide for years. For OCI is was a bottom-line decision, it would probably take multiple companies sporting the Grails Foundation/Unity Foundation to keep it going. What they did to Puneet was unfortunate and I just hope he finds something else soon.
worst case scenario if Grails doesn't get any new funding and community contributions aren't able to get Grails 7 out, I think people have a couple of options for the long term: port over to Spring Boot, or to Micronaut. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and you lose the convention over configuration(which means more annotations). I don't think anyone needs to pull that trigger right away, but I would have the thought in the back of your mind if things don't change.
g
Yes, Micronaut and Spring Boot are the two potential alternatives (if needed) that came to mind for me too and I was wondering if there were other suggestions here. We have a decent sized Grails monolith and have been planning to split out some separate microservices or smaller apps; however, were a relatively small team and don’t want to go microservice crazy. This may accelerate that plan, and/or make it a bit mor.e.. comprehensive.
g
I would say when a service gets too big it's a good idea to split out into services or microservices, to keep it more manageable. Doing the splitting can be challenging if you have a lot of cross-dependencies, and you may have to duplicate some code. Services should not share databases, so they can evolve and be updated independently. Sharing code can be a double-edged sword, if you do it keep it in small libraries that have stable code that doesn't update often, and doesn't create problems for multiple apps if you update it. I think Micronaut is a good choice for this because it gives you a lot out of the box, and feels similar to Grails, just with a lot more annotations.
m
The community is always the last to know the truth. I think they have know that but they don’t want to change.
m
See my other reply, if you want to slowly move away from Grails then Spring Boot is a better choice. Micronaut is great but there are too many gotchas in the integration with Grails. If someone still wants to go this way, there are still this series even it might need some polishing.
j
What happened with Puneet? Was he fired of Grails Foundation?
g
He was Laid off from the Unity Foundation from what I understand.
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m
Ironically, Puneet, a member of the Grails Foundation, didn't know exactly why it happened after he was laid off. Puneet has been developing and maintaining Grails almost alone for the past few years, and we're upset about what happened to him. Wishing him a better new job, but it's unclear if he will continue to contribute to open source Grails, as he is one of the few developers who understands the Grails framework.