SpringSource Acquires Groovy and Grails company (G2One)

SpringSource, the company behind Spring, has acquired G2One Inc., the company behind the popular Groovy and Grails technologies. With the acquisition of G2One, SpringSource will now offer global enterprise support offerings for developers and IT operations that utilize Groovy and Grails applications.

The Spring Framework, Groovy and Grails are three of the most popular application infrastructure solutions in the world. Groovy is one of the most popular alternative languages for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), with more than 30,000 downloads per month. Adoption of Grails has soared, with downloads racing from 7,000 to 70,000 per month in the past year. Both companies discuss the rapid rise and adoption of Spring, Groovy and Grails on their respective blogs, found at http://www.springsource.com/g2one. The financial details of the transaction are not being disclosed.

“Spring has proven to be a valuable part of the Java community, indeed, its helped evolve enterprise Java. Now, Java is becoming more than a language, but a platform for running more than just the Java language in the traditional enterprise context,” said Michael Cote, analyst at Redmonk. “Languages like Groovy and new frameworks like Grails have been part of this change in Java’s nature, so it makes sense for a company like SpringSource to acquire G2One and keep pushing, along with others, Java to the next level.”

G2One was founded by the Groovy and Grails lead developers, Guillaume Laforge, Graeme Rocher and Alex Tkachman in 2007. Groovy is an open source, dynamic language for the JVM that offers a flexible Java-like syntax all Java developers can learn in a matter of hours. Grails is an open source, advanced and innovative web application framework based on Groovy, and built on proven and high-performance open source solutions such as Spring, the most widely used enterprise Java application platform worldwide.

“Like Spring, Groovy and Grails have become a powerful cornerstone of today’s application infrastructure, driven by mass developer adoption worldwide,” said Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource. “The combined forces of Spring and G2One not only accelerate innovation, but also deliver SpringSource’s 24×7 global support network to the growing number of enterprises adopting Groovy and Grails at the heart of their applications.”

Groovy provides features that are common in other dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python and Smalltalk. It enables enterprises to leverage and protect their investments in developer skills, tooling and server software while enabling the rapid creation of innovative software.  SpringSource will utilize its proven experience working with popular open source projects, like Apache Tomcat, to ensure the continued development of the Groovy language.

Grails simplifies development and enables IT teams to establish fast development cycles through agile methodologies. Through extensive use of Domain Specific Languages, Grails simplifies development by providing an abstraction layer over enterprise Java technology, while still providing the full flexibility of the underlying Spring technologies.

“SpringSource and G2One are a terrific fit. Spring, Groovy and Grails have long shared a common mission of transforming enterprise Java, making it simpler, more practical and more powerful for developers,” said Graeme Rocher, CTO and co-founder of G2One. “Ruby on Rails showed how frameworks based on simple principles can dramatically improve developer productivity, creativity and lower maintenance costs. Grails has significantly improved upon those principles and brought the productivity of Rails to the de-facto enterprise Java stack, which is based on Spring.”

Related

* Grails is a breath of fresh air for Java developers

* Groovy and Grails – A Getting Started Guide

* Groovy bridges the scripting and the enterprise Java worlds