For the record the brand sites I worked on included Tropicana, Copella (leading UK apple juice brand), Tropicana Go! and PJ Smoothies, as well as Cobra beers. That’s 5 brands already. Some of those sites were simple, others included custom-written blogs, reporting and all kinds of non-trivial stuff.

I am with you however in not being happy at the progress to date – I know Grails is worthy of so much more exposure.

I share your hope that the involvement of SpringSource will help us gain traction.

In my experience contracting I find that the primary barrier to Grails usage is groovy and the dynamic programming paradigm – it is just anathema to most developers who need a lot of convincing before they see they light. This is not a problem specific to Grails, it applies to any dynamic language being “sold” to previously statically typed language afficionados.

Rails, on the other hand, continues to be the posterchild of the 2.0 community, even though I personally think Grails is superior in some ways. I really hope with Spring Source on the docket now, you guys will be ramping up the advocacy and increasing adoption.

Grails 1.0.3

Plugins:
fckeditor
quartz
testing
webtest
searchable
selenium
jsunit
and a couple of hand written ones

tv.sky.com, movies.sky.com, showbiz.sky.com, sky1.sky.com all run off the same codebase just styled differently and different modules on each page. These four sites in a month get around 110 million hits in total.

They essentially have 4 production nodes that sit behind a load balancer and a cdn. Since the site is so read heavy compared to write heavy we cache as much stuff up the stack as possible. That means we use our CDN pretty extensively as well as caching at the load balancer. Those 4 web boxes are all vm’s that point to a cluster of 2 postgres db’s vms. We have one node that isn’t available to the outside that is used for our rich publishing system that the editors use.

What else would you like to know?