The Grails team and G2One, the Groovy/Grails professional services company, have just released the final 1.0 version of Grails, the agile web application development stack, built on best of breed Open Source components such as the Groovy dynamic language, the Spring framework, and the Hibernate ORM solution.

Chris Richardson has posted "Running JEE applications on Amazon EC2: deploying to 20 machines with no money down," documenting EC2Deploy, a Groovy framework that can launch MySQL, Apache httpd, a set of Tomcat instances, and JMeter, as well as deploying web applications to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

java.sun.com has posted a new article, "JSFTemplating and Woodstock: Component Authoring Made Easy" by Ken Paulsen, Jason Lee and Rick Palkovic. The article shows how to use the JSFTemplating and Woodstock projects to make JSF components with only two files: a .java sourcefile (with annotations) and an .xhtml template.

ZeroTurnaround has released JavaRebel 1.0, a commercial product which eliminates the need for application server redeployment by instantly reloading changes to Java classes. It can also be used for standalone Java applications to pick up changes without restarting.