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Groovy is more and more rapidly gaining traction in the Java community. The JVM is becoming the standard hardware independent platform for almost all new applications -- especially those that are Web-oriented. Polyglot programming is rapidly becoming the norm: systems are developed in some mix of Java, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Jython, and JRuby. Until recently Jython and JRuby were being directly suported by Sun. However they have been ejected from Sun's corona as part of the purchase of Sun by Oracle.
Groovy has, since its inception in 2003, been developed by the open source community as a Codehaus project. Inspired by Ruby on Rails as a web application development platform, the Grails project was born, again driven by the open source community. But there is commercial development interest. The company G2One that was formed by the Groovy and Grails Project Leads, was bought some time back by SpringSource (who own Spring). They then put quite significant resources into Groovy and Grails development and most especially into Eclipse support for Groovy. SpringSource's interest in it was motivated by the fact that Grails was beating "Ruby on Rails" in the commercial arena; that it uses Spring (and Hibernate) under the hood; and that Grails is the easiest way of developing Spring-based applications that there is.
SpringSource has in its turn recently been bought by VMWare. So whilst Groovy and Grails are still owned by the community, VMWare is now putting resources into development via SpringSource, but guided by VMWare's commercial strategies. This means virtual machines and clouds.
Graham Rocher (Grails Project Lead) yesterday gave a presentation at Groovy & Grails eXchange 2009 in which he outlined what is coming in Grails v1.2, to be released within two weeks. Using virtual machines for deployment and getting into The Cloud were clear messages. Currently The Cloud more or less means Amazon (which may not acceptable for many businesses) but there was also the “private cloud” idea: business having internal clouds and using virtual machine technology to make applications deployment easier and isolated from the outside world. VMWare's hand in this message is rather clear, even though the presentation was branded SpringSource!
Grails, and on the back of it Groovy, is now being made ready for prime time: Grails version 1.2 and Groovy version 1.7.0 are being rolled out before the end of the year providing the base for next year's new crop of Web applications.