Welcome

Welcome in Maven Tools for Grails. We, at OCTO Technology, are using Grails more and more often to rapidly develop web applications compatible with JEE standards. Even if we love Grails we found that some pieces were missing to have a real adoption of Grails in a corporate environment. It's why we initiated this project to try to make its adoption easier.

Maven Plugin for GRAILS

The first limitation we found with Grails is that it doesn't provide an easy integration with Maven 2. Even if Grails is a killer framework to develop web applications in a productive and innovative fashion, in a corporate environment, we often find Maven to unify how projects are being built and moreover to create modular applications. Maven proposes several features that are cruelly missing to the build mechanism of Grails (ANT in legacy versions and GANT for now) :

• The corporate repository helps build dependent components and to share artifacts (a Maven project delivery). The SNAPSHOT feature (with a Continuous Integration server) lets you to be as close as possible to the development of another project. You'll be able to deploy your WAR in the repository to use it in an EAR...
• Transitive dependencies and the mechanism to resolve conflicts help projects to easily integrate others developments.
• Standard integration with a lot of the Continuous Integration servers.

You'll find over the web several articles talking about the difficulties of using Grails in a Maven environment :

• http://blog.interface21.com/main/2007/07/14/grails-and-maven-a-marriage-of-inconvenience/
• http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GRAILS-1386
• http://jonasfagundes.com/blog/2008/01/grails-the-good-the-ugly-and-the-bad
• http://graemerocher.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-grails-doesnt-use-maven.html

To solve this problem, we began to develop a plugin for Maven which allows you to build a Grails project inside Maven. Furthermore, you'll benefit from all the features of Maven 2. You'll be able to use a new library in your web application by just adding a dependency in your POM.

For all these reasons, we've started this project, and we plan to have several releases this summer.

Documentation

To learn more about the plugin, and how to use it, please read the documentation on the Maven-generated site.

Quick links Maven site / Plugin documentation Continuous Integration Issues tracker Subversion repository Released binaries repository Snapshots binaries repository Mailing List - Subscribe - Unsubscribe

Current planning

Stability