Awakening the Griffon
Griffon, inspired by the mythical creature, is a Swing application framework for Groovy.
Griffon is the fruit of almost a year's long effort by the Groovy Swing team and an attempt to take the best of rapid application development, as indicated by its Grails-like structure, the über-sexiness of Groovy, and the pleothra of components for Swing.
Griffon aims to reduce the typical confusion that occurs with traditional Swing development. Due to the MVC structure of Griffon, you never have to go searching for files or be confused on how to start that new project. Everything begins with:
griffon create-app <APP_NAME>
The builder infrastructure enables seamless integration of different widget libraries. Want to mix traditional Swing, JIDE, and SwingX? No problem.
Griffon's built-in scripts include targets for desktop, webstart, and applets. To not leave our Mac friends in the cold, the baseline requirement is Java 5 or higher. We thought it was very important for all platforms to have equal access on release day.
In this release, we have included three sample applications:
- Greet, a Groovy Twitter client featured in the JavaOne Script Bowl,
- GrailsSnoop, a Grails documentation browser, and
- WidgetsKitchenSink, a WIP showing components in the included widget sets.
Griffon is Swing simplified.
Download Griffon here and run through the Quickstart.
For the folks on Debian, I'll be rolling a deb soon. If there are any Windows or Mac folks who want to package the framework on those platforms, email the griffon-user list or tweet Danno, Andres, or myself so we can coordinate efforts.
Much thanks to those that have been poking and prodding the framework, kicking its tires and such. Continue to do so.