On this day, two years ago, Griffon made its first appearance. It's been a bumpy and interesting ride so far.

I'm glad to say that the codebase has stabilized itself pretty fast. We now have a very close integration with the Grails build system (after all Griffon started as a fork of Grails 1.1) to the point that we can contribute back to Grails (expect command target expansion in a future Grails release). Plugins are also another aspect of Griffon that has grown over the last year. There are over 100 plugins in the central repository now. Some of them are ports from Grails, some others have been ported to Grails, how cool is that?

Other recent developments include the availability of the Griffon Guide, your first stop to learn about Griffon and its internals. However on the next release (0.9.1) which should be ready soon(-ish) you'll find some cool features like

• Default imports on Groovy artifacts - packages griffon.core and griffon.util are automatically imported. This feature can be extended by plugins. AWT and Swing packages are also auto imported on View scripts that rely on Swing.
• Write MVC artifacts in non-Groovy - basically write any MVC component or artifact (like services) with any JVM language supported by Griffon, in other words, a native Clojure service interacting with a legacy Java view for example.
• Refinements to the Artifact API - which puts it right on par to Grails' Artifact API; you can now inspect a controller for all of its actions for example, or find out the event handlers available on a service.

Stay tuned for more Griffon news, there might be some other awesome developments by the time SpringOne 2GX comes.

Happy Birthday Griffon!