Andre and Danno, Where do you see Griffon fitting?

[Darrel Davis]

I am in the process of developing what will become a commercial application in Swing.
One of the decision points in choosing Java was its' cross-platform capabilities, even
though work is required to make it launch like a native application on each platform.

Where do you see Griffon fitting in the application space? Will it be/Is it suitable for development
of installable applications, whether open source or commercial? Are there any limitations which
would make it inappropriate for this? Are there any flagship applications that have been created
with Griffon?

Thank you for your answers,
-darrel

[Andres Almiray]

Darrel, Griffon is all about simplifying application development by automating as much as possible following a sound set of conventions. Because of this you can create both platform agnostic and specific installers for Windows, Linux and OSX (see Installer plugin at http://griffon.codehaus.org/Installer+Plugin). On it's own, Griffon can package your application in 4 modes:
- single jar: useful for single file distribution and deploying to the JavaStore too.
- binary zip: typical distribution, like the one you got by downloading griffon-<version>.zip
- webstart: all webstart related jars and files
- applet: all applet related jars and files

Griffon is licensed under ASL 2.0, most of the plugins too. That should be enough to let you build FOSS and/or commercial applications without worries on licensing.

To my knowledge I've not seen a commercial product made with Griffon yet, though I'm aware of a few companies that use it for internal application development. Griffon is quite usable as it stands today, and can only get better form this point. Most of the bells and whistles can be provided by plugins. Perhaps the most enticing for many would be the availability of a GORM plugin. However there are other persistence options coming up: GSQL (Groovy sql), CouchDB, Neo4j, DB4o and MongoDB.
Have a look at the growing list of plugins located at http://griffon.codehaus.org/plugins

Cheers,
Andres