This is an automated email from the ASF dual-hosted git repository. jamesfredley pushed a commit to branch soren-lifetime-award in repository https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/grails-static-website.git
commit beb57b4f23c1803fc1659524333de4076afe3141 Author: James Fredley <[email protected]> AuthorDate: Sat Jun 27 10:57:53 2026 -0400 Add Soren lifetime contributor announcement Add a researched announcement post for the 2026 Grails Lifetime Contributor Award recognizing Soren Glasius. Assisted-by: opencode:openai/gpt-5.5 oracle Assisted-by: claude-code:claude-opus-4-8 oracle --- ...-24-soren-glasius-lifetime-contributor-award.md | 51 ++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 51 insertions(+) diff --git a/posts/2026-06-24-soren-glasius-lifetime-contributor-award.md b/posts/2026-06-24-soren-glasius-lifetime-contributor-award.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000000..1b3463b4659 --- /dev/null +++ b/posts/2026-06-24-soren-glasius-lifetime-contributor-award.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +title: Søren Glasius Named 2026 Grails® Lifetime Contributor +date: June 24, 2026 +description: The Apache Grails community honors Søren Glasius with the 2026 Grails Lifetime Contributor Award. +author: James Fredley +image: grails-blog-index-3.png +--- + +# [%title] + +[%author] + +[%date] + +The Apache Grails community is proud to honor [Søren Berg Glasius](https://github.com/sbglasius) with the 2026 Grails Lifetime Contributor Award. The award recognizes long-term, sustained contributions that have strengthened Grails as a framework, an ecosystem, and a community. + +This recognition reflects something many Grails users, plugin authors, conference speakers, and project contributors have known for years: Søren has consistently shown up for Grails, helped others succeed with it, and invested in the health of the ecosystem around it. Today he serves on the Project Management Committee for both Apache Grails and Apache Groovy, trusted with stewardship of both projects. + +## A Builder Across the Grails Framework + +Søren's fingerprints are all over the framework itself. In the [Grails core codebase](https://github.com/apache/grails-core), his commits span years of work on data binding, REST and JSON view rendering, URL mappings, Geb and Testcontainers-based functional testing, the release process, and project metadata. When Grails graduated to a top-level Apache project, Søren took on the unglamorous housekeeping that removed the last traces of incubation from the codebase. As an Apache Grails PMC [...] + +One contribution is especially telling. Søren wrote the [external-config](https://github.com/sbglasius/external-config) plugin to restore the Grails 2-style external configuration that many teams relied on, and maintained it across Grails 3, 4, 5, and 6 - until that capability was absorbed directly into Grails core. A community plugin he authored and stewarded for years became part of the framework itself. + +## Plugins and the Grails Plugin Collective + +Much of Grails' real-world power lives in its plugins, and this is where Søren's sustained maintenance work stands out. He is a member of the [Grails Plugin Collective](https://github.com/gpc) (GPC), the long-running community organization that keeps dozens of essential Grails plugins alive across framework generations. + +He is the second most prolific contributor of all time to the [Grails Fields Plugin](https://github.com/gpc/fields) - the plugin that lets Grails applications render and customize form fields - with well over a hundred commits and a long series of releases that carried it forward through recent Grails versions. He has also contributed to other GPC plugins, including the [rendering](https://github.com/gpc/rendering) plugin, GreenMail email testing, taggable, Excel import, and PostgreSQL e [...] + +Beyond GPC, Søren authored and maintains a toolbox of practical libraries: the [external-config](https://github.com/sbglasius/external-config) plugin, an [i18n-enums](https://github.com/sbglasius/I18nEnumsGrailsPlugin) plugin for internationalized enums, and [utilities for understanding what changes between Grails versions](https://github.com/sbglasius/grails-versions). Taken together, this is exactly the kind of patient, cross-version plugin stewardship that keeps an ecosystem usable as [...] + +## Teaching, Documentation, and Practical Guidance + +Søren has also given the community durable learning material. While working as a Grails advocate and software engineer with [Object Computing, Inc.](https://objectcomputing.com/) (OCI), he helped customers with Grails upgrades, plugin development, conference speaking, and technical writing. On this blog, he authored [How to Use Travis-CI to Build and Deploy Your Plugin](/blog/2016-10-03.html), guiding plugin authors through build automation and publishing, and co-authored [How to Add Bui [...] + +That practical teaching continued on stage. At G3 Summit 2016 he presented "Get to Know the Grails framework," "Tour de Plugin," and "Fields Plugin - Deep Dive," and he brought Grails to European audiences with talks such as "The advantages of Grails" at Greach 2016 and a Fields Plugin deep dive at Greach 2018. For years he has also taught hands-on Groovy and Grails courses with material he developed himself. + +## A Community Organizer and Technical Voice + +Beyond code and documentation, Søren has helped make the Grails community feel like a community. In 2009 he [co-founded GR8Conf](https://glaforge.dev/posts/2009/03/04/announcing-the-gr8-conference-a-conference-dedicated-to-groovy-grails-and-griffon/) with Guillaume Laforge, then ran it for over a decade as the CEO of GR8 ApS - handling speakers, sponsors, venue, and the conference's visual identity while welcoming 120 to 200 attendees to Copenhagen each year. GR8Conf brought many of the [...] + +Søren also served on the Grails Foundation Technical Advisory Board from 2022 to 2024, where he represented the perspective of real Grails users and long-term adopters - weighing in on Grails 6, Java baselines, Spring Boot support, and maintenance windows. More recently, he helped guide Grails through its transition from the Grails Foundation to the Apache Software Foundation, helping secure the project's long-term, openly governed future. Today he continues to contribute through Apache [...] + +## Thank You, Søren + +Lifetime contribution is not a single feature, release, or event. It is the steady work of improving code, teaching users, maintaining plugins, organizing gatherings, reviewing direction, and helping the next generation of contributors find their way in. + +On behalf of the Apache Grails community, thank you, Søren, for your years of technical excellence, stewardship, and generosity. Grails is stronger because of your work. + +Please join us in congratulating Søren on the 2026 Grails Lifetime Contributor Award.
