We’ve been using Grails for over 6 years now. It is an amazing framework built on solid foundations and allows us to build massive systems at a very fast pace.
I had the opportunity to speak with Jeff Brown the founder of Grails and Steve Bowman from OCI. They asked me if I had any inputs to improve the community experience.
Few key things that I can think of within the eco-system that could be tweaked:
College and Universities
College students need to be able to experiment with the technology more easily. Early adoption of the technology is key to its proliferation. Young developers get into PHP, Ruby, Python etc initially because these technologies have been around and ubiquitous. We need to promote other dev tools and platforms like Gradle, Heroku, OpenShift etc and make them as ubiquitous.
Grails has a large eco-system now but making it as popular as ROR or PHP on college campuses would need a bit of an effort.
Community members perhaps need to present tech talks like:
- Build your final year project in Grails
- Prototyping your application faster with grails
Creative Commons Material
Introductory material like slides for community members to present at colleges and user groups. These could be Creative Commons licensed.
Reddit or similar community
Curated list of great blogs that the community could subscribe to. There are a lot of contributors already making contributions to channels like Reddit and Stackoverflow. But a little more encouragement might help.
Education
Tying up with computer education institutes to provide coursework and training. Maybe adding a certification for both student and a tutor to become an OCI certified Grails student/tutors.
Plugins
Possibly allowing users to request jumpstarting a defunct plug-in if there are enough requests then seeking someone from the community to revive it.
GR8Conf
The conference might be a great avenue to actually recognize community members and contributors. This might further fuel them to make a bigger impact.
If you are looking to contribute towards Grails, click here. If you are looking for work in Grails or Groovy, reach us at jobs@causecode.com
Would love to hear if you have suggestions to help Grails make a bigger impact as comments.
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