Dumped by Pivotal, Groovy moves to Apache

With Pivotal about to pull funding for Groovy, the dynamic language project is moving over to the Apache Software Foundation. Groovy has been formally submitted to Apache and is on a path to becoming a top-level project, Apache said on Wednesday.

Pivotal has prioritized around its Cloud Foundry PaaS platform, project lead Guillaume Laforge said in an email on Wednesday. This has left Groovy and the accompanying Grails Web development framework on the outside looking in at the company. “In a nutshell, Pivotal is refocusing essentially around its Cloud Foundry PaaS platform,” Laforge said, “and feels that Groovy — and Grails — are less strategic to it regarding that new focus.”

Pivotal announced in January that it would discontinue funding of Groovy and Grails after March 31, citing intentions to concentrate resources in PaaS, data, and agile development efforts.

The fate of Grails remains undetermined at the moment. “It’s still undecided whether the Grails project will follow suit, but some other projects of the Groovy galaxy might join us later on once/if we [successfully] go through the incubation process,” for Groovy, Laforge said.

Apache is a good fit for Groovy, Laforge believes. “As I’ve explained on my blog, with the loss of funding of the project by Pivotal, we wanted to send a clear message to our community, our users, to signal that the project is here for the long term, regardless of any sponsoring company, and that we value and care for our community, our ecosystem, our users, our code base, more than anything else,” he said. “The Apache Software Foundation shares the same philosophy, and we — the Groovy team and myself — thought the ASF would be the best home for Groovy.”

Laforge will continue his involvement with Groovy while also working at API platform provider Restlet, but team members on Pivotal’s payroll have to find jobs elsewhere, he said.