Today we are releasing our first Grizzly 2.0 release, which we are working on since almost 2 years. Get ready for the revolution! But how this Grizzly things started?

It has been years since I've jumped into the blogosphere and started talking about Grizzly. Officially, Grizzly started in 2004 when Vivek Nagar and I talked about NIO. At that time I wanted to propose a new Tomcat connection based on NIO but got some resistance with the other developers. So we decided to keep it for us, specially after we did some benchmarks against the Netscape's WebServer Sun have :-). Developing Grizzly 0.x was a challenge as it was "sandboxed" by our application server internal API (and gigantic "resistance" from the think thanks ;-)). I wasn't allow to change any API there (quite a challenge)...Grizzly 1.0 was born in a sandbox, and yes some of its design was horrible, but the SJS AS team was happy as no API were changed and Grizzly got finally accepted in SJSAS 8.1 PE (not EE :-)) Then we open sourced what has becomes GlassFish and make a lot of noise about Grizzly/GlassFish. Starting from zero, we then worked hard to build a community around Grizzly inside GlassFish. We got a surprisingly nice numbers of early adopter event if the API were not perfect. Amongst them was Phobos, AsyncWeb, Jetty, Sailfin Convergence Load Balancer (zzzzzz Sailfin uses Grizzly 1.0 and 1.8.6 under the hood, but they don't talk about it;-)), GlassFish v3, and the popular Grizzly JRuby (which is still the foundation of GlassFish v3's JRuby support!).

Over 2006, we worked the next version, called Peregrine, with peoples from MQ, IIOP, Performance, SOA, etc. During that time, we also saw the Grizzly community growing and we've decided to release an intermediate version 1.5, which goal was to not break the compatibility with 1.0. That was an extremely tough decision for me as it left aside a lot of great designs/code Charlie did for Peregrine. But now I think we took the right decision, looking at the adoption and more important, the community around Grizzly.

We have then started working on Grizzly 2.0 based on what we have learned from 1.x, 1.5.x, Peregrine, the current community feedback and of course new ideas, without sandboxing ourself (so breaking compatibility with the NIO framework 1.9.x). We also switched the lead so API gets better designed without noise from the pass :-)...we also merged Ken's and John works, let Alexey innovates and now get ready!. With this healthy community we are now ready to make the big step: 2.0.0-M1 is now available for download

Read Alexey's blog about what this release include, download it, browse Javadoc or gives feedback on users@grizzly.dev.java.net. Now what will happens with 1.9.15 and up? We will maintain innovations for the 1.9.15 event after 2.0.0 GA as we don't want to force the community to upgrade. More important, we stay untouched the popular APIs like GrizzlyWebServer (I,II,II,IV, V, VI). So we have years before us :-) Also major users of 1.9.x (to name one: GlassFish v3!) will soon be released so we have no plan to stop innovating/fixing bugs with 1.9.x...we still fix issues for 1.0.x users, so no worries! Want to follow more about the monster community? Follow us on Twitter!

technorati: grizzly web server embedded