Many long-term readers of our blog may have noticed a post about Grails Framework topics every now and then. We are using Grails for more than 15 year both in customer projects and internal ones.
Sometimes using the framework was fun, productive and bliss. At other times it could be frustrating upgrading, chasing bugs or finding workarounds. Occasionally, performance could be a problem. Most of the time it was a solid framework with solid output and customer value.
The more recent past
Ownership/stewardship of Grails changed several times over the years from one company to another. Updates were very infrequent, the general direction was very unclear and the future of the framework extremely uncertain.
Because all of the above we did not start new projects using Grails and did not recommend it to potential customers but instead used other frameworks like Micronaut, Javalin or .NET.
But suddenly there was light at the end of the tunnel: Grails was handed over to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) in the middle of 2025 and became a top-level project there. That by itself may not be a complete turnaround and rescue for the framework, but it certainly sparked a bit of hope into the whole situation.
The presence and future
Since the adoption of Grails by the ASF a lot has changed. Tons of work has been going on in the background to streamline future development, work on reproducible builds (as required by the ASF) and to enable frequent releases, updates and improvements.
Grails 7 was born and release under ASF stewardship. The community is more open than ever and it seems to be growing again after years of stagnation or even decline.
The roadmap and plans for the next months is clear and the project is moving with a steady pace towards the goals. Of course, there is a lot of work to do, like reviving and porting several plugins to enable all users to migrate to Grails 7 and beyond – but it is happening.
Conclusion
If all the positive changes under the stewardship of the ASF continue, the future of Grails can be bright for the years to come. At least, it does not pose a liability or risk for its users and their customers anymore.
In my opinion, two things besides all the technical stuff are most important:
- The strong commitment of the ASF to further develop and enhance the project provides safety for developers and customers investments
- The mindshift from an exotic framework to a productive, JVM-based framework leveraging standard technologies from the java/spring/hibernate ecosystem provides familiarity and stability
Imho, this quote of the Project Management Committee (PMC) chairman James Fredley says it best:
Grails is NOT an exotic outlier. It’s PRODUCTIVITY LAYERS on top of SPRING BOOT.
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