Original Source

Danno Ferrin just announced that Griffon now has its own project space at the Codehaus.

Related to this news, some of the builders maintained by the Griffon team will be moving into the Griffon umbrella, these are SwingXBuilder, JideBuilder and GraphicsBuilder. The builders will still be released on their own timeline though and will not require you to link any Griffon runtime library in order to use them, same way as it has been before.

[Editor: mispellings are intentional, they are Danno’s signature].

Tags: Danno Ferrin, Griffon, Groovy

The following list is a compendium (in chronological order) of Griffon related links. You may notice that half of them are written by Geertjan Wielenga, zone leader at Javalobby and known blogger on such topics as NetBeans, Swing and Groovy. In Geertjan’s own words

It’s not like I’m constantly looking for useful scenarios for Griffon and then blogging about it. It’s more like I keep tripping over them accidentally, all the time. I just can’t help it!

Announcements

• Announcing Griffon 0.0 - Danno Ferrin unveils the first release.
• Awakening the Griffon - James Williams follows suit.
• Griffon takes flight - Andres Almiray doesn’t stay behind
• Griffon shows its claws: Grails-like rich Swing client framework released - Guillaume Laforge blesses the release and points to useful links

First Impressions and how-tos

• Getting Started with Swing MVC Development on Griffon - Geertjan Wielenga writes about NetBeans having Griffon support just 24 hours shy of the framework’s release. This is possible due to Griffon closely following on Grails’ structure and the nature of NetBeans Grails support.
• Revisiting the hidden threading rule - Andres demonstrates the threading facilities that Griffon exposes to every controller.
• Flying with Griffon - Geertjan writes about his impressions on the framework as he completes his first demo.
• The 5 Best Things About Griffon - Geertjan
• Porting a Groovy app to Griffon - James talks about his experience of porting a previous Groovy app (GFlubber, based on JFlubber) to Griffon.
• Porting to Griffon - Geertjan also describes the steps he took for porting a simple Swing app to Griffon.
• Griffon: Identifying the Dark Underbelly of Java - Geertjan: “Griffon defines guidelines for how an application’s sources should be structured”.
• Griffon + JDK 6 Update 10 = 100% Free Draggable Applets - Geertjan. Griffon makes it plain simple creating draggable applets.
• Further Experiments with Griffon - Geertjan continues with his Griffon demos and discover a small bug when setting a property on applets.
• Griffon: injecting resources with Fuse - Andres shows another ported application, an example of the Fuse resource injection project.
• My First Griffon App - Josh Reed joins the Griffon bandwagon. He writes on his first Griffon application, an specialized one based on drill data in Antartica. This application relies on JFreeChart to display several views on the data itself.
  
• MigLayout: Inevitable Choice for Griffon Users? - Geertjan ask the question: will MigLayout be the layout of choice for Griffon app development?
• Carbonado and Griffon - James describes another sample app that relies on data persistence using the Carbonado framework, a light ORM alternative.
• How Griffon Helps MigLayout - Geertjan answers his previous question with a more ellaborate Griffon application that relies on MigLayout to place all components. It also shows how easy is to setup a Griffon application that can call webservices using the groovy-websevices package.
• An Approach to Pluggable Griffon Applications - Geertjan. Griffon may support framework plugins in the near future, but what about application plugins?
• Pluggable Applets via ServiceLoaders, Groovy, and Griffon - Geertjan. The previous pluggable application, now in applet mode.
• Griffon as a Quick and Dirty Learning Tool - Geertjan. Griffon can help you quickstart a Swing application, just fill in the specifics and you’re done

Tags: Griffon, Groovy

Original Source

Swing developers rejoice, the productivity gains and ease of use of a framework like Grails has arrived. The Groovy Swing team is proud to announce the initial release of Griffon, a Grails-like framework for Swing application development. In words of Danno Ferrin, the most prolific contributor to the project:

After over a year of poking and prodding at the various parts of desktop Java the Groovy swing developers are proud to announce the first release of Griffon, a Grails-like tool for Swing development. While not yet industrial strength we felt it was important to put out a release so people can get a feel for what Griffon is and where it will be going. And since all good computer scientists start counting from zero, 0.0 seemed to be the perfect release number.

What are some of the highlights of Griffon?

• A Grails like build system for desktop apps, including targets to run the application.
• A directory structure that rewards MVC separation of code.
• Use of Groovy programming language features to reinforce MVC separation (builders, @Bindable annotation, metaclass method injection, scripts, etc).
• A view layer based on Groovy’s SwingBuilder, allowing for a declarative layout of GUI code.
• An infrastructure to allow seamless injection of other widget libraries. JIDE and SwingX are supported out of the box.
• Automatic packaging and signing for WebStart, Applet, and traditional application deployment.

Why call it Grails-like instead of rails-like? The structure of the directories and some of the design idioms do have a heritage back to Ruby on Rails, but Griffon is more inspired by Grails than it was by Rails. And by “inspired” I mean “taking large chunks of Grails code to bootstrap the codebase” (thanks to the ASL 2.0 this is permissible). Not all Grails features have been brought over yet. Plugins and GORM are two notable standouts that we would like to add in future releases.

To download the current release please visit the wiki page at http://groovy.codehaus.org/Download+Griffon and follow the links. There is also an installation guide and a quick start tutorial on the wiki as well.

Those who attended the ScriptBowl session at JavaOne 2008 got a sneak peek of Griffon in action when Guillaume Laforge presented Greet, a Twitter client, on stage. Later Danno Ferrin did the same on another session. Griffon relies heavily on the conventions set out by Grails, which means any Grails developer will be able to pick up the framework and create Swing applications easily.

Being the initial release expect some rough edges here and there, and as Danno notes, some of the more appealing features of Grails like GORM and the plugin system are not implemented yet. The Griffon project has a mailing list for those interested to participate in the discussion.

Tags: Danno Ferrin, Griffon, Groovy, Swing