I think one thing that both Groovy and Grails need is better Eclipse support. You can look at IntelliJ and Netbeans 6.5 for how this should look like.

Karsten

Spring scaled down the developer code lines from too much to very less. I remember the java 1.4, Spring 1.2 days so much of configuration code, boiler-plate code et al. All that for appreciable but much less compared to Today's capabilities of Annotation driven, less-code-more-productive Spring enabled applications. Simplification of Acegi is one such (amazing) example.

Glad to see you appreciate the big progress we've made with respect to the simplification of Spring apps over time. Personally I love using Spring 2.5–and have found each version of Spring easier and more fun to work with.

Grails of course is quite another take on simplicity for developers–but we certainly aren't forgetting Java developers using Spring directly.

Rgds
Rod

Well, you were using Spring all along, at least indirectly… We'll be glad to have you around.

Rgds
Rod

I can only dream what can Groovy/Grails do for Spring. May be a true Active Record in a Java App.. or even a 5 min Spring-enabled EE application (or atleast base code). Wow. Good days are ahead

-Sarath.
http://blog.sarathonline.com/search/label/spring

you seemed to like the newly proposed JSR 308 here (http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/05/JSR-308) to use new annotations and language features to enforce more checking at compile time. Now that SpringSource turns to Groovy, does it mean you have changed your mind?

Spring uses a lot of one method interfaces to provide extension points. Don't you think that code could be simplified with Groovy's closures? Do you plan to use more Groovy in Spring's code?
What's your (and the Spring team) personal take on dynamic languages?
Thanks.