During the past weeks there was a series of sneak peeks on features available in the soon-to-be-released Griffon 0.9, as a summary:

• command line
• application archetypes
• testing
• packaging
• infraestructure
• runtime

The good news is that the latest release has arrived! You'll find the full list of changes here. It is a well known fact that with every Griffon release a set of new plugins become available. However in this case the set's size is bigger than usual; here's a quick rundown on what you can expect.

Layouts

As Geertjan prophesied in MigLayout: Inevitable Choice for Griffon Users?, MigLayout is now available as a plugin. But it's not alone, there are other layout alternatives in the form of DesignGridLayout, RiverLayout and ZoneLayout.

Look & Feel

Java Swing applications have always been attacked as not looking native enough (or even good enough). No problem, just install the LookAndFeel plugin and you get a configurable way to change the Look & Feel, even after the UI has been displayed. Many Swing developers will agree that the most versatile and elegant L&F theme collection is found in the Substance project, you'll be happy to know that Substance is available as a pluggable L&F provider, along with A03, EaSynth, JGoodies Looks, JTattoo, Kunststoff, Liquid, Metouia, Napkin, NimROD, OfficeLnfs, Pagosoft, Skin, Squareness, Tinylaf and Tonic.

Effects and Glitz

Closely related to the L&F topic are effects and additional glitz; basically stuff that makes your apps look better while improving the user experience. There's a new group of plugins that provide well know icon sets, like Everaldo's Crystal, Tango! and Mark James' Silk collection. They are joined by Nuvola, Feeds and Countries (also from Mark James' famfamfam flag icons).

The Effects plugin brings you script.aculo.us inspired effects, and while the current number of effects is less than the original you can expect more to be added at a later stage. Charting is now easier thanks to the Charts plugin, which bundles Groovychart, a Groovy builder for JFreeChart. Making graph visualizations is also simple with the JGraph plugin. Lastly, the JXLayer plugin paves the way for compatibility with the upcoming JLayer from JDK7.

Testing

You'll find a totally revamped testing infrastructure as one of the biggest changes in Griffon 0.9's buildtime package. This change allows for a new kind of plugins to be built, perhaps the most awaited one is the Spock plugin as it opens the door for a wide range of options. This plugin is a direct port of it's Grails counterpart. Clover is another port from Grails, also marking the first release of a Griffon plugin from a commercial offering.

Persistence

On the persistence front we find two new plugins focused on NoSQL: Riak and Memcached. The latter comes with the 3 most popular java clients for connecting to memcached/membase servers, giving you the option to pick and choose the one you like best.

General

Finally we also get the Maven Publisher plugin (another port from Grails). This plugin helps in publishing/deploying plugins and applications to Maven repositories, a perfect companion to Griffon's new Dependency DSL mechanism (also borrowed from Grails).

All in all 36 new releases, not bad Most of the already existing plugins have had releases too, upgrading themselves to Griffon 0.9 and adding a few features. And there are more new plugins coming in the future: 3D support, NoSQL, domain classes, scaffolding, etc.

Keep on Groovying!