SpringSource announced today the acquisition of G2One, the company behind Grails and Groovy. From the press release:
...With the acquisition of G2One, SpringSource will now offer global enterprise support offerings for developers and IT operations that utilize Groovy and Grails applications ... “Like Spring, Groovy has 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 24x7, global support network to the growing number of enterprises adopting Groovy at the heart of their applications.”...
InfoQ sat down with SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson and G2One CTO Graeme Rocher to discuss the acquisition. Johnson began by saying that Grails and Groovy are technologies that SpringSource believes in and therefore it made sense to invest in. SpringSource has noticed a significant growth in dynamic languages with the download numbers for Grails increasing 10x in the last 12 months. In terms of how the deal came together, both indicated that mutual interest had been present for a while and that an acquisition would allow them to work closer than if just a partnership had occurred. Johnson went on to mentioned that he is excited to raise the profile of Grails as well as being able to integrate Groovy/Grails across the SpringSource product line in technologies such as SpringSource dm Server. Rocher noted that he expects Groovy and Grails to be able to take advantage of SpringSource's experience in building Eclipse tooling support. In addition to an interview with InfoQ, Johnson also blogged on the acquisition headlining with "More Weapons for the War on Complexity". In the post he commented on why Groovy instead of JRuby:
"...There’s plenty of buzz around Ruby on Rails. Grails—of course, benefiting from the experience of Ruby on Rails—offers the same benefits, but without the many serious impediments to use in the enterprise that face RoR. With Grails, you can enjoy rapid application development and programming in a dynamic language without needing to throw away your investment in Java middleware; without the need to make inefficient web services calls to talk to functionality coded in Java; without losing the benefits of sophisticated O/R mapping; without the risk of hitting a wall with scalability or enterprise capabilities; without adopting an unfamiliar programming language for all your coding..."
Finally the company has posted a FAQ on the acquisition. Among the highlights are the fact that Spring and Groovy/Grails will remain Apache licensed.