Preface

The book you’re holding in your hands went through a lot of iterations before it reached its final form. We’re not referring to the editorial process, but rather to the deep relationship it has with the topic it discusses: the Griffon framework. Both evolved at the same time almost from the beginning.

On a peaceful October afternoon back in 2007, Danno Ferrin, James Williams, and I (all members of the Groovy development team) had a very productive chat over Skype about the future of Groovy’s SwingBuilder—an enabler for writing desktop GUIs using Swing as a DSL. We recognized the potential of mixing and matching different builders to write richer UIs, but the current syntax wasn’t pleasant to use. We drafted a plan and got to work on our respective areas.

Fast-forward to JavaOne 2008, where the three of us got to meet face to face for the first time. Joined by Guillaume Laforge, we hatched the idea of what was to become the Griffon framework. We knew that Grails was making waves in the web space, and we felt the need for a similar outcome in the desktop space. Cue the light-bulb moment: we agreed that creating a desktop framework that stuck as closely as possible to Grails would be the way to go—although we didn’t have a name for it yet.